The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) (31 page)

Lily poured a stiff vodka, swallowed it, then poured another big one. She gulped it down, almost gagging. She wiped her mouth, went back to the office, deleted all the files and wiped out the computer’s recent history. Then she went to the gun safe in the bedroom. But the spare pistol was gone.

Heart in her throat, she grabbed her coat and rushed outside.

She didn’t notice the small white envelope lying on the table, addressed to her.

Beppie drove home in the pouring rain, a cold sweat over her skin, wipers clacking. Smoke was dense in the canyon, the road slick after months of no rain. She took a bend too fast in her dark-blue truck with the
D
on the number plate. Tires squealed.

“Mom? You okay, Mom?”

She slowed down, heart hammering. “It’s fine, girls, fine. Just worried about Dad and the fire and the storm.”

And about what Rachel had said. What that female cop had said. Beppie gagged, tried to breathe, tried to calm herself.

Clint would be back at the fire hall by now with all this going on. She turned on the radio, listening to the news. The possibility of a mandatory evacuation of Snowy Creek was raised. Their ranch was much farther north, a different valley. But it didn’t mean they were safe from this lightning and other fires.

When she pulled into the driveway and drove up to the house, the trees were swaying, rain coming sideways. She could smell smoke, thick, coming from another fire somewhere north.

“Go into the house. Get your bags ready,” she told the girls. “I’ll be right up.”

While her girls went into the house, she ran through the rain down to the shed and took the key from under the rock near the door.

Beppie creaked the door open, searching with her hand for the light switch on the wall. Branches scratched and squeaked against the tiny window. As the bulb above the workbench flickered on, animal heads leaped to life and leered. Thunder boomed.

Beppie got down onto her hands and knees and felt under the counter for the metal box. She dragged it out, fetched a crowbar, and stuck it into the padlock. She wrenched hard.

It took two tries to get the correct angle before the lock cracked open.

She got back to her knees, opened the lid.

Her entire world came to a standstill as everything seemed to fade into the distance. It was as if she’d opened the lid to the basement of hell, a place she had known existed, which she’d buried in her own soul. Something she’d never wanted to think about or poke at. The reason she hated coming into the shed.

With shaking hands, she scrabbled through the rings and earrings in the top compartment of the metal box. There were locks of hair tied with wire. Human teeth. It was all here. Trophies. Things he said he found in the woods, that he liked to collect. She glanced up at the bear head, the stuffed bobcat. Trophies from his hunts. Memories of a kill.

Beppie gagged again, bile coming up her throat as she lifted the top compartment off the toolbox. Under it were three photos with time-date stamps. Like ones taken with a cell phone, then printed out.

Time slowed further, and the sounds of the storm and wind completely disappeared as she lifted the first one up. It had been taken nine years ago, according to the stamp. The night the girls had disappeared. It was fading a little, the colors off. It had been taken in a dark place. A picture of a woman’s thighs, lily white. A man inserting his penis into her. His fingers digging hard into her skin as he held her steady. A dragon tattoo across his buttocks. In the other two photos he was forcing the muzzle of a handgun into her vagina. There was blood.

Beppie lurched up, retched into the sink. She hunched there while the room spun. She ran water until it was ice-cold. She splashed it all over her face. Her whole body was shaking as another wave of violent stomach contractions bent her over. She threw up again, washed and wiped her face, threw the towel into the sink.

Panting, she grabbed a plastic bag from one of the drawers and stuffed the jewelry and teeth and hair inside. She ran with the bag up to the house.

“Get your bags and get in the car, girls!” she yelled as she ran through the living room into the study and struggled with shaking fingers to unlock the gun safe. She removed a twelve-gauge shotgun and several boxes of slugs.

The girls obeyed, quietly. They were scared of what was happening to their mother.

Once they were all buckled up, Beppie hit the gas and roared down the driveway with the girls and their bags in back. She turned left onto the farm road.

“Where are we going?” Janis said.

“I’m taking you to Mrs. Davis. She’s going to watch you guys. I need to do something. If the fires come this way, go with the Davises. Do what they say.”

“I don’t like Mr. Davis.” Susie started crying in the backseat.

“That’s because you’re scared of his bee suit,” taunted Janis.

“Am not!”

“Are too.”

“Quiet!” Beppie snapped. The girls jumped.

Susie sniffled louder. “I want my dad. Where’s Daddy?”

God will protect us. God will be the final judg
e . . .
God will keep my children from Evil. We must do difficult things for it is God’s way, we cannot always understand his wa
y . . .
we must purge the Evi
l . . .

Beppie repeated these mantras in her head as she turned into the Davises’ driveway.

CHAPTER 24

His phone was ringing somewhere in the room, in the distance of his mind, buried in his pile of clothes on the floor. On one level Adam knew it was his wife. On another he couldn’t seem to absorb it. He lifted up the woman he loved, slammed her back against the wall. She gasped from the impact. Panting, she wrapped her legs around him, hooking her ankles behind his butt. She arched her back, thrusting her pelvis against his, hard, fast, the friction driving them both high, wild.

He staggered sideways, sending her snowboard and bike crashing to the hardwood floor. She gripped his balls, rotating her hips, milking his erection with her tight vaginal muscles. His skin was wet. He was growing dizzy, hotter, as he met her thrust for thrust, grunting, driving as deep as he could. She fisted her hand so tightly in his hair that his eyes burned. She pulled his head back by his hair and kissed him, biting, thrusting with her tongue until he tasted blood but didn’t care. Suddenly she froze. With a scream, she threw back her head, exposing the long, creamy column of her neck as she shattered hot and wet and hard around him, contractions seizing control of her body. And he came inside her, a sweet, hot, pulsing release of everything.

Clarity began to sift back into Adam’s brain as they lay side by side on a mattress on the floor under the skylight, watching the rain and listening to the wind. The air was cool against his hot, damp skin. His phone rang again. He let it go to voice mail with only a faint twinge of guilt. He’d left instructions in an envelope on the dining room table for Lily. And now it was time to leave the woman he loved. She was the one who had given him his edge, his reason to get up mornings. To look forward to the day. She had made him feel alive again. Brandy was the reason Adam had coped over these past two years.

He rolled over onto his side and traced his finger over her smooth alabaster skin, admiring her honed body. She was young. Perfect. Flame-red hair.

His wife might turn to vodka. He had his Brandy.

“Something’s worrying you,” she said. “What is it? This Jeb Cullen thing?”

“I went to see my mother,” he said. “She gave me the pendant that Merilee Zukanov was wearing the night she disappeared.”

A strange look came over her face. She sat up, cross-legged, facing him, her hair falling in a tumble over her pale shoulders. Her nipples were a dusky pink, pointing at him. His gaze wandered down her flat belly, to the flare of red hair between her open thighs, where she was still wet and glistening and sticky from their sex. He put the tip of his finger in her belly button, trailed it slowly down her abdomen, down to the apex between her thighs, then suddenly he stuck his finger up inside her. She gave a gasp, then a small moan of pleasure as he moved his finger inside her, her lids fluttering low as he felt for her G-spot. Adam felt himself grow hard again. He could make love to this woman all day, over and over, like a rutting bull, and get it up each time. He’d never been able to do that with Lily.

Brandy was so at ease with herself, with her own femininity, her strength and sexuality. He slid his finger slowly out of her vagina, watching her face. A slow smile curved over her mouth.

“Careful, Deputy Chief, I could make you suffer.” But her smile was not quite lighting her honey-gold eyes. She was worried. She could read him like a book, and she knew something was very different. Very wrong. Slowly he pulled his finger out of her, leaned back.

“Luke borrowed my Jeep that night,” he said. “I had time off from the RCMP in Edmonton and had come home for Thanksgiving. I went to see a movie at Lily’s place, just up the road, and I let my brother take my Jeep to the pit party. I came home early.”

Brandy reached for her denim shirt, put it on, gave a little a shiver. She didn’t say a word, just waited for him to continue, an odd look in her eyes.

“Luke came home around three a.m. I woke when I heard a thud, like a body against the front door. It was Luke, passed out against the door. He was wearing a gray hoodie and it was covered with blood. I asked about the blood. He said he must have cut himself at the pit. There were a lot of broken bottles there, glass everywhere. I was pissed, thinking he’d driven my Jeep home in that state, but he said that Clint had brought both him and the Jeep back, then walked over to his own place, which was one street up. Luke said that he, Clint, Levi, and Harvey had been at the pit party but had gone to Harvey’s house sometime after ten p.m., where they’d had more to drink. I asked Luke where my Jeep keys were, and he said he didn’t know, that maybe Clint had them. I helped get him inside, helped him take the hoodie off, but he had no cuts on his body. I left the hoodie in the bathroom, on top of the laundry basket. I never checked the pockets. I fetched my spare keys, went out to check my Jeep.”

Brandy didn’t look well suddenly. “Why are you telling me this?”

“I need to.”

She swallowed, then said quietly. “What was in the Jeep?”

“There was some blood on the backseat. The medallion was there, too. The Jeep was covered in black mud, tires thick with it. There’s no mud like that anywhere near the pit. The gas tank was almost empty. I had a GPS mounted on the dash, which I’d left on. I took the GPS inside and downloaded the route from that night. My Jeep had been driven from the pit up to the trailhead and over the trestle bridge, to the old copper mine, then back down, north along Highway 99 for about twenty miles, then up into the Rutherford drainage.”

“Where the trapper’s cabin was,” she said quietly. “Where Amy had been.”

Adam nodded. “The Jeep was then driven straight back to our house. Not to Harvey’s. The time stamps were not consistent with Luke’s story, either. I saved the route to my computer log and put the GPS back into the Jeep, then went to sleep. I didn’t think too much of it. Mostly I thought Luke was so wasted he didn’t know what he was talking about.”

Adam scrubbed his hand over his brow. “Next morning around nine thirty a.m., I went outside and I found my Jeep as clean as a whistle, washed and detailed. Mud gone. Blood had been scrubbed out, just a damp spot on the backseat where it had been. My GPS was also wiped clean.”

Brandy looked away. The wind rattled windows and rain slashed at the skylight. The sky was darkening. “Yet you still had the medallion,” she said.

“Yeah.”

“And the bloody hoodie?”

“It was gone from the laundry. I assumed it was in the wash.”

“And then you heard the girls were missing.”

“Later that day, yes.”

“Shit,” she said.

They both sat silent for a moment, just the sound of the storm crashing through trees outside, the flicker of lightning through the skylight above them.

“What happened then?”

“I saw the missing person posters. They used photos of the girls taken earlier that night. Merilee was wearing the medallion in the photo. I confronted Luke, told him I’d found a medallion in my Jeep. He said I was full of shit, I didn’t know what I was talking about, and that they’d all seen Jeb Cullen driving off with those girls.”

“You believed him?”

“I don’t know what I believed. Perhaps I just fooled myself because I didn’t want to think what else it might mean. My brother was not a bad guy, just an asshole sometimes. My mother’s team questioned everyone who’d been at the pit party. Those four guys all had the same story. All said they’d seen Jeb go north with the girls. Trey and Rachel had also seen Jeb with the girls in his car before he left the pit. So yeah. I started to think Jeb had something to do with it. I put the medallion in an envelope in my drawer.”

“Why?”

“Because—” He dragged his hand over his hair. “Because otherwise I’d have to get involved. I didn’t think it was that relevant. At that time my GPS route didn’t mean much. But then, seven days later, Amy was found staggering along those tracks. Twenty miles north, in the area the GPS said my Jeep went. It’s a drainage thick with black mud. God knows how she was still alive. But humans can be resilient, even when lost in snow in the wilds. And Amy was a fighter. She’d have had water from the snow and river, and there were old sacks in the trapper’s cabin to wrap herself in. There were rope marks around her neck, and she’d been brutally raped. But too much time had passed to collect viable semen evidence. There was, however, the pregnancy. They arrested Jeb, impounded his vehicle. Later I heard that they found a gray sweatshirt with Merilee’s blood in his car, and in the pocket of the hoodie was an empty pack of date-rape drug.”

“You thought the hoodie could have been the one Luke came home in?”

“I don’t know what I thought. It could have been a coincidence. Gray hoodies were common enough at the time. Jeb and Luke were about the same size. I asked Luke what happened to his hoodie. He said he threw it out. I asked him why my GPS had showed they went north. He said he didn’t know what the fuck I was talking about. We got into a yelling match. He stormed out but my mother overheard. She came in and told me to mind my own business. To just let things ride. To say nothing.”

“Did you tell her about the GPS route, the bloody hoodie he was wearing, the medallion?”

“Yeah, I told her. I told her I was in possession of the medallion and that I’d seen the GPS route north into the Rutherford drainage. I didn’t mention I’d saved it to my computer, though. At first I thought she was in some kind of denial. But then she shocked me by saying I had a choice to make. I could keep quiet, go back to Edmonton, look after my career, stay clean and clear of all this. Or I could make a huge stink trying to take my own family down, my own mother, own brother, and that I had no evidence to go on. I went straight to look for the medallion, and it was gone from my drawer. I thought it was Luke who took it.”

“It was her.”

He nodded. “A single mother protecting her boys. And, I think, also protecting my father’s legacy as a police hero. In turn my mother became a cop who didn’t care that an innocent man went down for a crime he didn’t do. And she made damn sure he went down for it. She buried him. She believed he was a bad person, expendable. My own goddamn mother.”

“She planted the shirt?”

“I figure it was her who logged it into evidence, fudging the date. When this discrepancy in the log was questioned during the hearing to overturn Jeb’s case, counsel claimed it was simply a police error, that someone forgot to log the hoodie in initially and the oversight had been redressed. By this time my mother’s dementia had progressed too far to question her directly.”

“The other DNA on the shirt?”

“My guess is it matches Luke’s.”

Worry flared sharply in Brandy’s eyes. “Luke’s gone, Adam. He can’t be tested. Or punished.”

“Familial profiling will work. The DNA profile from that shirt will come up as a brother of mine. The son of my mother.” He paused. “The things we do for love. For our children.”

“So where is Merilee’s body, then? What happened to her?”

“My guess is we’ll find her in that mine.”

“What if no one looks in the mine?”

“Jeb will get to that point. Rachel will get there. It’s just a matter of time.”

Brandy looked away, pressing her hand to her stomach. “But if no one tells anyone to look in the min
e . . .
”

“Brandy, look at me.” He cupped the side of her face, forcing her to look at him. “It’s over.”

Panic flared through her features. “What do you mean, over?”

“I need to do the right thing now. I need to make the choice I should have made nine years ago.”

“Why are you telling me this? You didn’t need to tell me this. You don’t need to tell
anyone
this.”

He got up, pulled on his clothes. He felt oddly at peace now. He hadn’t realized how heavy the weight of suppressing a dark secret could really be, how much of a toll it had taken on him over the years. And what a catharsis confession was.

“I already have, Brandy. I wrote out a full confession. I included the medallion and a flash drive containing the GPS route.”

She stared at him in silence for several beats.

“What’s this going to do to
us
, to your boys?” She avoided mentioning Lily. Lily was like a blind spot to Brandy. “What will this mean for
our
future?” Her voice was going high, her eyes shining wildly.

“My boys will grow up knowing their father finally did the right thing, the honorable thing. It’s better this way than me being prosecuted and put away, with them growing up while their father is behind bars. It’s just a matter of time. Already I’ve been sidelined.”

“What do you mean?”

He held his hand out to her, helped her up, and kissed her deeply. Her body was rigid in his arms. “Good-bye, Brandy,” he whispered over her mouth, kissing her lightly one last time.

He made for the door.

“Where are you going?”

He stilled, hand on the doorknob. “I love you. You know that.”

“You are going to leave her, right? We
will
be together one day, like you said, when the boys are a bit older. We’ll have children of our own, like you said. W
e . . .
we will get married one da
y . . .
” Her voice strangled itself. Her eyes were manic.

“I love you. I will always love you.”

“Adam, don’t give that confession to anyone!”

But he was gone, door closing behind him.

Brandy raced to window. She watched him running lightly down the stairs in the beating rain. Panic struck like a hatchet. She flung open the window. “Adam! No!” But he was getting into his truck. The door slammed shut. And he was gone.

Fuck.

If Rachel and Jeb didn’t go looking down the mine, Adam could stay safe. They could stay together. Have their future. Desperation clawed through Brandy’s chest and panic rose in her throat. Everything she had ever wanted was crumbling in front of her.

She cursed viciously, dragging her hands through her hair. Her eyes burned. She started to shake.

She thought of the group of mothers at the base camp when she’d brought the kids down earlier today, how they’d told her Quinn was Jeb’s child. How Rachel’s bringing Quinn to Snowy Creek had lured Jeb back, and now everyone’s lives were tearing apart.