The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) (28 page)

His mother had tried to protect her sons.

How far would he go to protect his own sons?

The things that were done for love. For family. How wrong it could all go.

His mother had left the RCMP to take the top cop job here in Snowy Creek, where she believed it might be safer, easier, to raise her boys alone. Adam remembered his mother’s pride in becoming the first woman to hold down the chief position with the Snowy Creek PD. But later that night he’d heard her crying in her room. He’d opened the door to find her holding a framed photo of his dad. She had been furious with him for finding her in that state.

He gripped the sink with both hands, hung his head down.

He’d also left the RCMP to come raise his boys here. To make Lily happy.

Why did you become a cop, Ada
m . . .
Was it because you believed once in justice, the la
w . . .

He dried his face and went into the kitchen, where he made tea and put shortbread cookies on a plate because he could find no gingersnaps.

He sat with his mother while she sipped from her cup, and he wiped her mouth. Because of the stroke she dribbled when she ate or drank. His mom had always taken care of him and his brother. Now here he was taking care of her. And he was looking after his wife. His world was crumbling around him.

He waited for Rubella to return. Then he went back to his truck and put on his music—old Jamaican ska. He inhaled deeply. His alter ego had wanted to visit Jamaica. As a kid, instead of snowboarding, he’d wanted to surf in the warm sun. It was why he’d stuck a Hawaiian surf sticker on the back of his Jeep all those years ago, after a visit to the islands.

He had a choice to make.

His mother was gone, inside her own head.

His brother was gone.

His choice could not hurt them.

Why did you become a co
p . . .

He had become a cop because his parents were cops, because they had both wanted their sons to be cops. They’d planted the seed in him. They’d watered that seed with tales of the legendary Sam Steele of the North West Mounted Police. A quintessential Victorian, imperial hero, a big barrel-chested bear of a man with a grand, sweeping mustache who cleaned up the gold rush saloons, brothels, and gambling dens of the wild Pacific Northwest, who kept the American whiskey traders at bay.

Adam had believed in justice, retribution. The law. Childishly so.

Until that night the girls had gone missing.

Until he had turned a quiet blind eye and everything turned subtle shades of gray.

H
e
’
d thought the grayness was part of becoming an adult, seeing life for what it truly was in all its tricky nuances. But then had come the conviction and incarceration of an innocent man. Adam knew his inaction had been key to that conviction. He was as guilty as the rest who had perjured themselves. And he knew deep down they had. Now he was back here. Snowy Creek. With sons of his own. Full circle. To face the role he had played in his own mother’s and brother’s criminal actions all those years ago. To face his own guilt.

Adam reached for his phone. Dialed.

She answered on the third ring, sounding breathless.

“I need to see you this evening,” he said. “I jus
t . . .
need to be with you, talk to you. Can I come round?”

She laughed and whispered dirty things in his ear. Her voice was a salve. She was his addiction. She was the reason he coped with Lily, with being in Snowy Creek, with everything.

Adam hung up, started the engine. This was the beginning of the end. He had to do this. And he would do it for his sons.

Annie drove up the rutted driveway to the Rudiger house.

“Check that out,” she said to Novak with a tilt of her head as they passed a wash line full of laundry. “Black toque. Black men’s sweater. Black jeans.”

Round the side of the house, a blue truck was parked.

“See if you can take a look at that truck while I speak to the occupants.”

Annie went up the steps to the front door, knocked while Novak ambled round the side of the house.

A plumpish woman opened the door, cheeks flushed. She had a white apron on, flour on her hands.

“Beppie Rudiger?” Annie said. “I’m Constable Pirello, with the Snowy Creek PD.”

“What is it?” The woman’s gaze shot immediately toward a shed down the yard. Annie turned, following her gaze. She waited a beat, then said. “Is your husband home, Mrs. Rudiger?”

“No. H
e . . .
he’s out. Why?”

“He’s not in that shed?”

“No.”

“Is that his truck round the side?”

Something hot flickered through the woman’s face. A blonde child appeared at her side. “Susie, go inside,” Beppie Rudiger said as she stepped out, closing the door behind her. “It’s my truck. Clint drives a Dodge Ram. Red.”

“He take the Dodge Ram to work on Wednesday?”

“What’s this about?”

“Your truck matches the description of a vehicle that was placed at an arson scene, ma’am.”

Blood drained from her cheeks. She swallowed, looking nervous.

“Did your husband perhaps borrow your vehicle Wednesday?”

Beppie reached for the banister on the side of the stairs. “
I . . .
I don’t recall. You’d need to speak to him.”

Annie nodded, holding the woman’s eyes. Novak meanwhile popped back from around the side and Beppie Rudiger jerked in surprise.

“Plate has a
D
,” Novak called up to Annie.

“Do you mind if we take a look inside the truck, Mrs. Rudiger?”

“Yes, I do mind. I don’t like the insinuation here.
I . . .
I’d like for you both to leave. Now.”

Annie turned her back on Beppie and made a show of taking in the landscape. “Nice place. Rural. I also grew up on a farm, in Quebec. My mother liked to air-dry the laundry, too.” She turned back to face Beppie. The woman looked ill suddenly. “When did you last do a wash, Mrs. Rudiger?”

“What’s that got to do with anything?”

“Black toque,” Annie said with a nod toward the washing line.

“It’s getting cold,” Beppie snapped. “People wear toques when it’s cold.”

Annie’s pulse quickened slightly at the woman’s reaction. They were on to something here, she was sure of it.

“What’s in the shed down there ma’am?”

“That’s my husband’s shed. It’s where he does his taxidermy.”

Annie raised a brow. “Taxidermy? He likes to hunt?”

“Goes on two long hunts a year. We store the meat in the freezer down there.”

“Might we take a look?”

“No.” She wiped her hands on her apron suddenly, as if they were sweating. “I mean, it’s Clint’s space. Not for me to say who goes in there. Look, if you want my husband, you can get him at the fire hall. He’s the fire chief in Snowy Creek.”

Annie nodded again and smiled broadly. “It’s his day off today, I believe.”

Beppie said nothing.

“You sure he’s not around? Out back maybe?”

“He’s getting hay from one of the farms down valley. For winterizing the garden.”

“He keep his hunting weapons in that shed?”

“In a safe. In the house.”

“Rifles, shotguns?”

Beppie’s mouth formed a tight line. “That’s what he hunts with.”

“Any handguns in there?”

She swallowed. “I wouldn’t know.”

“Well, thank you for your time, Mrs. Rudiger.” Annie started down the stairs to join Novak, but stopped halfway down and turned around once more to face Beppie Rudiger.

“Your husband was discharged from the army, is that correct?”

“He left the army to spend more time with his family.”

“Dishonorable discharge, right?”

Beppie Rudiger went even whiter. The wind ruffled her curls.

“Something to do with a sexual assault allegation,” Annie said, “but it was later dropped?”

Silence.

“Where was your husband April ninth, ma’am?”

Beppie opened her mouth. Then closed it again.

“I know, six months ago is a long time to recall something specific like that. No worries. We’ll ask him when we connect with him.”

“Religious,” Annie murmured quietly as she walked with Novak back to the cruiser. “Crucifix around her neck.”

“Doesn’t mean she’s religious.”

“Good chance it does.” She opened the door. Beppie was still standing sentry at the top of the steps, watching them.

As they exited the driveway and turned down the farm road, Novak said, “Shit, I’m thinking there might actually be something to Cullen’s claims.”

Annie snorted, stealing a glance up at the sheer rock slopes and avalanche chutes of Mount Currie as she drove. It was not far from here that her sister had gone missing. “Cat among the proverbial pigeons,” she said softly.

“What?”

“I said, Cullen is like a cat put in among the pigeons.”

Novak stared blankly.

“You know; scattering everyone, getting them running scared. Jesus, Novak, where’d they find you, anyways?”

He was silent awhile. “Can I ask you something, smart-ass?”

“What?”

“Why do you think Chief Mackin put you and me on this case? I mean, look at us, nosing around the head honchos in town when there is already an official investigation into the arson.”

She glanced at him.

“You’re brand-new. Easy scapegoat if this all goes to hell. Me? I’m up for retirement next year. If this goes to shit, Mackin sends me out to pasture early and he kicks your ass right out of the valley. He tells the police board you were a loose fucking cannon. He claims he didn’t even know we were sniffing around the case. However this shit hits the fan, Mackin has his ass covered all ways to Sunday.”

Annie swallowed.

“So, yeah, who’s the smart-ass, now?” Novak said, removing a half-eaten Snickers bar from his pocket.

CHAPTER 22

“Rachel?” Kerrigan jerks her head up as I enter her office. She gets up and quickly closes the door behind me.

“Guess I’m not that welcome here, huh?”

“I’m sorry, Rach, but that stunt at the Shady Lady has everyone here kinda steamed.”

“Stunt?”

“You know what I mean. It’
s . . .
your paper that gave him a voice, okay? He accused our chief of perjury. You know how things work among first responders, We’re tight, have each other’s backs.” Kerrigan looks as though she wants to say more but bites her tongue. “What can I do for you?”

I inhale deeply and decide to just go for it. “Before Amy Findlay shot herself, she called the fire hall.”

“She did?”

“This number here.” I push the piece of paper on which I’ve written the number toward Kerrigan. “Do you know whose extension that is?”

She looks up, meets my eyes. Silence hangs for a moment.

“Look, Kerri, you know me. I don’t want trouble any more than anyone else does, but a man’s life is at stake.”

“A man’s life? Christ, Rachel, hardly. He’s not in prison anymore. He’s free. I don’t know why you’re doing this.” She shoves the piece of paper back at me.

“He’s
not
free. Not until he can prove he didn’t commit that crime. Look at how the town’s reacted to his return. Look at your own reaction.”

Her eyes flicker. “That’s because of your newspaper, him naming names.”

I lean forward. “Three men tried to kill him before he even went to the paper. They burned his place down, and I don’t believe they would have stopped there unless he
had
gone to the papers and spooked them. You can’t honestly think Jeb razed his own property and somehow managed to beat himself up with a tire iron? Please, tell me whose extension that is.”

Kerrigan’s jaw tightens.

Frustration flares in me. “Okay, can you at least let me know who was on duty the evening of April eighth?”

“I’m not sure that’s public information.”

“Of course it is. You work for the Snowy Creek municipality. The taxpayers are your employers.”

“Then go get it from the municipal office.”

I stare at her.

“Look, you chose to make yourself the enemy here, Rachel. I have enough trouble as it is bonding with the guys. I’m not going to be the one to hand this information over.”

I drag my hand over my hair. “Okay, what about you—were
you
on duty the evening of April eighth?”

She inhales deeply, holding my gaze.

“Please.”

She curses under her breath, grabs the firefighter calendar on her wall, unhooks it, and slaps it on her desk. She flips back to April.

I freeze as an image catches my eye. “Wait—” I clap my hand down on her calendar. “That photo, back there, flip back a few pages.”

Startled, she lets me take the calendar.

I quickly flick back a few months and come to the photograph. My blood turns cold.

A firefighter. His big muscled back to the camera, his skin oiled and gleaming, fire pants hanging below his hips, exposing the top of his buttocks. He’s working an old-style water pump, but it’s the tattoo snaking up from the exposed top of his buttocks that rivets me. A tail. A dragon’s tail. With an arrowhead shape at the tip.

“Who is this?” I whisper.

Kerrigan looks at me oddly. “A lot of the guys posed for that. It’s a fundraising calendar. They do it each year.”

“That tattoo, it’s a dragon.”

Undulating dragon.
Amy watching Merilee being raped.
Pumping dragon.

“A dragon across his butt, yeah, he’s had it since school, apparently.”

“Who has?”

“Chief Rudiger.”

A dull roar sounds in my brain.

“You okay, Rachel? What is it?”

I clear my throat. “Wa
s . . .
was Clint Rudiger at work on the evening of April eighth?” I grab the piece of paper from her desk, hold it up. “Is this
his
extension?”

Laughter and men’s voices reach us from the next room.

Kerrigan’s complexion pales. She gets smartly to her feet, walks around her desk, opens the door. “I think you should leave. Now.”

I glare at her. Her reaction has confirmed it for me. The extension belongs to Clint Rudiger. Clint with the dragon tattoo. But Kerrigan has shut down. She stands unflinching by the door. But underneath the flint of her gaze I detect something else, a whisper of uncertainty, fear even.

I get slowly to my feet, go to the door. “I’m not the enemy, Kerri. I just want the truth.”

She says nothing. I leave and she shuts her door firmly behind me.

I walk quickly out to where I’ve left Jeb in the parked truck, get in.

“What happened?”

I explain the photo of Clint, the dragon tattoo, Kerrigan’s reaction.

“Jesus,” he whispers.

I turn in the seat to face him. “April eighth was a Thursday, Jeb. Fridays are traditionally Clint’s days off—it’s why Kerrigan always works on a Friday. If he was sticking to his schedule, he had opportunity to be in Vancouver on Friday the ninth, the day my sister’s house burned down.”

He swallows, eyes narrowing, a vein on his brow beneath the small butterfly sutures swelling.

“Clint also fits the physical description of the man who visited Amy’s duplex after those phone calls.”

“Fuck,” he says quietly.

We both sit stunned for a moment.

I recall what the West Vancouver police told me at the time of Sophia’s fire, that a lot of evidence is destroyed by the first responders to a blaze.

“What better person,” I say, my voice hoarse, “to set a fire, to try and hide the fact it might be arson, than a firefighter? He could have taken the answering machine tape from the phone, the voice mail Amy left Sophia. He could have silenced Sophia.” Something else strikes me. “They never did find her cell phone, Jeb. And her laptop was damaged beyond retrieval.”

“It’s all circumstantial,” Jeb says.

“But it’s feasible.”

“We need proof. We can’t do a damn thing without
proof
.
”

“Let’s go to the pit,” I say. “We can take a look at the place again, walk you through that night. Maybe being there will prompt something fresh in your own memory, like that music, the scent of dope, maybe even that newspaper ad for the firefighter’s calendar, finally prompted Amy’s.”

As we drive north we see a dark bank of clouds building over the mountains. The wind has increased, bits of branches now blowing across the road. The first of the storm fronts is approaching.

Thinking about Clint Rudiger, the possibilities, Jeb turned the truck off the highway, drove over the bridge, and crossed the train tracks. As the waters of the Green River churned beneath them, a strange feeling wrapped around him. He felt as though they’d just crossed some kind of threshold and were going back in time, things closing around them, past melding with present.

He took the truck across a wide clearing that had once been used as a turning circle for vehicles ferrying basalt from the pit. This was where the two girls had gotten out of his car nine years ago. They’d run back across this clearing toward a grove of alders, while he’d turned south onto the highway and headed home. Engaging four-wheel drive, Jeb entered a narrow, rutted logging road hemmed in by forest on either side. After about a mile, the road opened suddenly into the wide gravel pit on a bench of land above the tracks. It had once been a quarry.

They parked and got out.

Hydro wires were near, and the air hummed with a crackling electricity. Jeb’s heart began to hammer and his skin pricked with perspiration.

Nothing had changed. Rocks lined the high bank. Dry grass pushed through the stones in clumps. There were remains of small campfires. Broken bottles, beer cans. Kids still came here. Did the same things.

He turned in a slow circle, his boots crunching over gravel, sun collecting against his leather jacket and black hair. An eagle soared up high, cried.

Rachel slipped her hand into his, cool, slender, strong. He looked down into her eyes, the years suddenly spiraling, kaleidoscoping back to that moment, the night that had changed them all.

“She tried it with me, you know. Retrograde hypnosis. In prison,” he said.

“Sophia?”

He nodded. “Well, that’s what she called it. She took me back to that night several times. Walked me through to see if I might have missed a detail that could help. We found nothing new. She said at the time that returning here, then trying myself to re-create the events of that night, might spur something.”

“How did Sophia do it?”

“She’d induce the hypnotic state, then step-by-step, walk me back as if in real time to re-create a vivid picture of the past, something I could examine.” As he spoke, Jeb walked with Rachel up to a blackened circle surrounded by heavily charred logs.

“Here,” he said, “was the bonfire. You and Trey were sitting on a sleeping bag against the slight rise over there.”

Her hand tightened in his. His face felt hot. The sounds of that night started coming back to him. Music. Someone had a drum. Rachel and Trey laughing, jeering at him. Amy teetering toward him, silhouetted by the orange flames, her high-heeled boots digging in between the tiny stones, low-cut blouse. Amy grabbing his arm. The eerily dancing light from the fire.

“I’m so sorry,” Rachel whispered suddenly, pulling him back to the present. “It was my fault.”

He turned to her and took her face in both hands, looking deep into her eyes. They were liquid, wide, vulnerable, as if she had nothing left to hide. The fragility of what he held in his hands, right here, suspended between past and present, could not have been more stark to him.

“No, Rachel,” he whispered. “We all took actions that night that held consequences.” He bent down and kissed her lips, so gently, poignantly, a wild, ferocious rushing in his heart. Rachel melted into him, against him. This was how it should have been that night. This was what he should have left with.

Maybe it was a good thing to confront this place, the past, together like this. To come full circle. There was a lot to be said about closure. She pulled back, looked up at him. “Let’s go back to the bridge crossing, Jeb, where they claimed they saw you turn north onto the highway.”

Jeb stopped the truck in exactly the same place he’d stopped to wait for the train before crossing onto the highway that night. He wound down the window as it had been. He could smell smoke, carrying from the Wolf River fire with the new wind direction. There was a brown haze in the western sky.

“Think back. Walk me through it, Jeb,” she said softly.

He closed his eyes, inhaled deeply. “I could smell smoke. Like now. But it was from the bonfire up at the pit. My car was facing the tracks, like this. I was heated. Angry. At you. At myself for having slept with Amy in the backseat. Angry at getting drunk.” He swallowed, face going hot. “We had drunken sex in my car while it was parked up at the gravel pit. I hardly even remember it. Then, when I was going to take Amy home, she saw Merilee at the pit, and offered her a ride home with us. My head was spinning. I was unfocused. I shouldn’t have been driving, but I did.”

He sat silent for a while.

“While the three of us were in my car, waiting here to cross onto the highway, the train came rumbling past. Loud. Screeching wheels against the tracks. Amy was in the passenger seat next to me. She was facing the back, talking to Merilee. She had a fifth of brandy; they were passing it back and forth.” Jeb glanced up into the rearview mirror. “I could see Merilee in the mirror, brushing her hair, a gold pendant glimmering in the hollow of her throat.”

“That’s why they found her hair in your car—she was brushing it.”

He nodded. “I guess she might have hooked out the earring they found, too, while brushing. The girls were giggling, saying something, but the sound of their voices was being drowned by the noise of the train. The whistle sounded. It was piercing. The water under the bridge was rushing loud. My brain felt thick.”

He closed his eyes again and thought deeper, trying to take his mind back further, trying to force clarity into the fuzziness of his drunken memories. The scent of smoke was stirring something fundamental inside him. Suddenly he could see again the luminescence of moonlight on the frothing white surface of the river. He could feel again the steering wheel of his car clenched in his fists, the tightness in his neck and shoulders. He heard the train coming again. He could smell the booze and cigarette smoke and perfume on the girls. Sweat trickled down his spine. He could taste Amy in his mouth, her lipstick. Shame, remorse, washed through him.