Virtue Falls (35 page)

“That’s one of the reasons we kept moving. Dad didn’t want me raised in a foster home. And I didn’t want that, either. The kids in foster homes were always … damaged.” With finely tuned irony, he said, “I didn’t want to be damaged.”

Elizabeth shifted toward him. She stroked his arm as if taking the old, bad pain away with a brush of her hand.

Deliberately, Garik slowed down his rush of words. The worst was over. He’d told Elizabeth the truth. She felt bad for him. She realized she wasn’t the only one who had had a tough life and been maligned by jackasses like Marrero. Garik’s story had done its job. He was glad. He was proud. Of himself. Really. “Margaret was also in the emergency room—she actually
had
fallen down some stairs, and Harold insisted she come and get checked out. She heard the medical personnel talking about me, and it pissed her off good. That little Irishwoman doesn’t like bullies. She has a thing about taking down bullies.”

“I’m sure she does.” Elizabeth seemed to think for a moment. “With her background, I understand.”

“Next thing I knew,” Garik said, “my father had disappeared and I went to live with Margaret.”

Elizabeth petted him with more strength, more conviction. “Thank God. He might have killed you.”

“But I … he was my father.” Garik remembered the way he had cowered at the resort for days and weeks, the tears that soaked his pillow as he waited to be beaten and then discarded. “I was scared, reluctant, amazed to be living at the resort, thrilled to have three meals a day that I didn’t have to scrounge out of a garbage can.” Then more tears soaked his pillow … as he missed his father.

Elizabeth scrubbed away her own tears with one hand.

“Don’t cry. C’mon, this is the good part.”

“I know.” She sniffled. “I’m happy for you.”

“I went to school, worked hard to catch up. Margaret was strict about that, I can tell you, and she told me the only way a kid like me would get ahead was to be smarter than everyone else.”

Elizabeth smiled, a wobbly smile of fellowship. “Aren’t we lucky that we
are
smarter than everyone else?”

Garik repeated, “But … he was my father, my only parent, and he was gone.” Good, Garik. Tell her the pitiful stuff, then moan about your good fortune. She had to be impressed.

“You missed him.”

“I loved him. It doesn’t make sense, I know.”

“He was your father, your kin, your blood. And you missed him.”

She understood. Garik couldn’t believe it, but she did understand.

When someone leaned on the horn behind him, she jumped, and Garik was almost relieved to see a cop car in his rearview mirror. Not Sheriff Foster this time, though. Garik waved the boy deputy around, rolled down his window, and called, “Sorry, I dropped a Coke in my lap. We’ve got it cleaned up now.”

“You don’t need assistance?” The cop was obviously disappointed. “Then move along—it’s dangerous to block the road.”

Garik watched him drive off. “Right. We’re the only two on the road, but it’s dangerous to block it.” Putting the pickup in gear, he drove slowly, sensibly. No more tire skidding.

“What happened to your father?” Elizabeth hadn’t taken her hand off his arm.

Garik should have known she’d want to know the whole story. And he was going to tell her, because … why not? Once he’d come this far, he might as well spill all the beans. No more secrets. No more lies. Give her the straight stuff and let her run as far and as fast as she could to the other side of the world. “When I was a teenager, he came back. He jumped me after school and said he wanted his share of the good life. He wanted me to get money out of Margaret.”

“Oh.” Elizabeth took a breath. “That’s why you got into trouble. With Foster, I mean.”

“Yes. I robbed a few stores. Gave my father the money. Got caught and Margaret bailed me out.” He didn’t want Elizabeth feeling sorry for him. Too late for that, of course. “I wanted to handle it myself, and having Margaret bail me out made me … it humiliated me. I swaggered. I shouted. I was a little asshole.”

“But your father wasn’t gone.”

Of course she figured that right out. “No.”

“What did he do?”

“He … my father told me I was a failure. He listed all the reasons. I never stood with him. I was my mother’s son. I ran when the going got tough. He made it sound like it was my fault he abused me. He undermined me. Sound familiar?”

Elizabeth pulled her hand away. “You’re saying Andrew Marrero has abused me.”

“Marrero knows too much about you. He knows the buttons to push. Yes, he has abused you, and the reporter is right. Marrero doesn’t want to stand in your shadow, he doesn’t want you to be the spokesman for the scientific community. He saw the video you took of the tsunami, heard your commentary, realized that with your looks, scientific credentials, and pure good luck at being the only knowledgeable person on site during the earthquake and tsunami, you’ll supplant him and be the new star of every PBS and History Channel geological special for the next twenty-five years. So Marrero’s going to keep that video hidden until the earthquake is old news. This is no time to be naïve.” Garik pulled into the resort parking lot. “The guy’s an egotistical, self-centered bastard.”

“He’s one of the men who could possibly have been my mother’s lover.” She squinted through the sunny windshield, then, as if she had just now remembered she held them, she slid her sunglasses on her nose.

“That, too.” Garik parked right next to the front porch steps. “If she told him it was over, he had every reason to kill her. Hell, he had every reason to kill her even if he wasn’t her lover. He could have killed her to set up your father as the killer so he could direct the dig.” Another motive, and one all too obvious.

“That’s absurd, to kill someone over something like a job title.”

“Nothing’s absurd when it comes to power. Men will do anything for power.” If Garik had ever doubted the truth of that, the recollection of another father’s smile made him writhe with anger and pain.

“Power regardless of the price. I don’t understand that, but I’ve read about it, and I believe you.”

“I know this stuff, Elizabeth. It’s part of my training.” And his memories.

“Tell me the end of the story,” Elizabeth said. “What finally happened between you and your father?”

Garik looked up at the resort, all four stories of it. “He broke in, but this time he didn’t come after me. I was now taller, stronger, more reckless than him. He came after Margaret, because she was old and frail.”

“Oh, God.” Elizabeth sighed. “Of course. What happened?”

“The next day, when the sun came up, my father was dead on the rocks at the bottom of the cliff below Margaret’s balcony—and she faced manslaughter charges.”

Elizabeth thought it over. “Who killed your father?”

“I did. I shot him, and when he didn’t die, I threw him off the balcony.”

CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR

Somewhere in the depths of her mind, Kateri lived.

She couldn’t move. She didn’t eat or drink. She didn’t think. She floated in time, in space, like a galaxy formed from a billion stars, like a fetus awaiting rebirth.

As she floated, she was growing, changing. Molecules realigned themselves. Bones knit. Bruising healed.

But cells mutated. Her body was not what it had been before.

Occasionally she caught a wisp of humanity hovering close. Occasionally she smelled antiseptic and flesh. Occasionally she heard voices, muffled by distance or time … or pain.

The pain was always there, her newest companion. A constant companion. She almost felt it. If she could grasp the tendrils of that pain, it would guide her up, out of this darkness.

But every time she tried, every time her fingers brushed the writhing tendrils, she didn’t feel pain. She felt agony … blistering, tearing, ripping her soul and her sanity.

Then she sank back into the depths, and floated. Floated …

A tendril of crimson pain flicked at her consciousness. Taunted her. Enticed her.

Come back. Be a person again.

She caught. She pulled.

Anguish. Torture. Legs, arms, back, belly. So … much … pain.

But she pulled again, nerves burning, muscles trembling, brain afire.

She heard things: beeping, voices, cloth rustling, a tuneless humming. The sounds got nearer. Nearer.

No. Go back, Kateri. Don’t come up.

She opened her eyes.

Movement. Above her. Around her. Humans working, saying things, urgent sounds she didn’t understand.

To the side, gauges popping with colors.

On the wall, a television set to … to the Weather Channel.

A window. Sunshine slanting in.

She tried to speak. Something in her mouth.

She tried to move. Something holding her down.

And pain. Pain exploding in all the far reaches of her universe.

Her heart beat loud in her ears.

Her breath rasped in her lungs.

She fought, and trembled with the effort to be free.

Then … the effort broke her will. She let go of the writhing pain tendril.

At once she sank back down into space and time … and isolation.

But she would be back.

Soon.

CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE

The ground started trembling.

The truck started trembling.

The inn started trembling.

“There it goes again.” But there were things that needed to be said. “The only other person in the world who knows that I killed my father is Margaret.”

“I understand.” Elizabeth wasn’t paying attention to Garik. She looked toward the ocean, blue and glittering in the sun. At the parking lot, wrinkled from previous aftershocks. At the resort, which swayed like a tall ship in a storm.

He had to raise his voice to be heard over the creaking of the truck and the cracking of the asphalt. “If the FBI ever finds out, my career will be toast. It already pretty much is, but I could do time, so don’t tell anybody.”

“No, of course not.” She spared him a glance. “But that explains a lot.”

He wanted to ask what exactly she thought it explained, but abruptly the shaking got worse. He grasped the door frame to hold himself in place, reached a hand across to Elizabeth, and wrapped his fingers around her wrist. Like that would protect her. But even after his confession, he needed to hold her.

People staggered out of the resort and onto the porch, grasped the rails and uprights, looked around in panic.

“The truck is hopping around.” Leaning and rolling with the ground waves. Garik spared a thought to his shocks and struts.

“This is a major aftershock, well over six-point, I think.” Even Elizabeth’s voice shook.

Then the shaking died away, moving on inland to wreak more destruction on the already broken landscape.

“It’s a great thing for me to have experienced such a cataclysmic event,” Elizabeth said. “Professionally. But it can stop now!” She yelled the last two words out the window, then looked surprised at herself.

To Garik’s amazement, he wanted to laugh. He’d just torn out his guts for her, told her all his long-held secrets, and he wanted to laugh? Really?

He needed to face facts; he was never going to be more important to Elizabeth than an earthquake. That’s why she wasn’t reacting to his confession. He didn’t need to imagine she was okay with the fact that he had been a sniveling kid who had grown up to be a murderer. Because she did mind, or would later when she’d had time to think about it.

Yet another glance at her aggravated face again made him want to laugh.

He must be hysterical.

He cleared his throat. He let go of her wrist. He looked at the people lining the porch. “What is Mike Sun doing out here?”

“I don’t know. Who’s Mike Sun? Oh, wait, I remember—he’s your friend.”

“Yes.” Garik might as well tell her. “He’s also the coroner.”

“You went to see him today.” She remembered that, too, of course.

“Yes.” No need for more explanation, unless she demanded it. Garik looked around the parking lot. “Where’s his car?”

“Did he perhaps ride a bicycle?” Elizabeth pointed to two road bikes chained to the resort’s racks.

Garik slid out of the truck, came around to the passenger side, and opened Elizabeth’s door. As she descended from her seat, he took care not to touch her.

But she put her hand on his shoulder to steady herself, and moved close to him as Mike and a woman—wow, that must be his wife, Courtney—came off the porch and across the parking lot toward them. Both looked windblown and healthy, and had helmet hair.

So Elizabeth was right. They had come by bike.

“Hey, good to see you, and so soon!” Garik raised his eyebrows at Mike.

Mike said, “Courtney wanted to take a ride—you remember Courtney, don’t you, Garik?”

Garik offered his hand.

Courtney took it, pulled herself into him, and did the double cheek kiss.

She was almost his height, built like a Barbie doll, top-heavy with no hips and long legs. She had a tan so natural and smooth it looked fake, hair so black it was obviously dyed, and she was as gorgeous as Garik remembered. He didn’t know quite what to do with her, so he gave her a hug and stepped back as fast as he could.

“Of course I remember Garik. When we were in high school, I thought he was the only man I could ever love.” Courtney tucked her hand into Mike’s arm. “Until I saw Mike.”

“I was there all the time. You overlooked me.” Mike grinned at Elizabeth and offered his hand. “I’ve seen you around. It’s good to meet you at last.”

“It’s good to meet you, too,” she said.

Mike’s grin got bigger. “You don’t have the foggiest memory of me, do you?”

“No.” Elizabeth scrutinized him now, though. “But if I don’t look up, I don’t have to see which people are gossiping about my parents.”

“Whoa. There’s a burden I never imagined.” Courtney embraced Elizabeth and did the cheek touch with her. “I like you. You’re real. Shall we go in and see how Mrs. Smith is doing? When the earthquake started, she grabbed an unbroken vase and refused to leave.”