Last Chance Harbor (47 page)

“Oh yeah, elated. But you know what?”

“What?”

“Sausalito is right across the Golden Gate Bridge. I say we’re on a roll.”

“But Ryder you look like you need a good night’s sleep first.”

“Nope, let’s do this with Cooper before he does something that causes him to crash and burn.”

J
ulianne couldn’t argue with the view of the Golden Gate Bridge looking north toward Sausalito. She gaped like a tourist.

“We have to splurge and blow our budget to stay one more night in one of these inns with this spectacular view. We have to.”

He laughed and picked up her hand. “If we have to then we will.”

Using the map she’d downloaded before they left home, she instructed him to a secluded gated estate made of stone and red tile. Julianne had done her homework. She already knew Cooper resided in the guest house in the back.

“The gate may pose a problem.”

“You wouldn’t happen to have a phone number, would you?”

“Yes, but don’t ask how I came by it. You aren’t the only one who sprang for a sleuth.” She punched in the digits on her cell and waited. When a voice answered she went into her pitch. “Is this Cooper Jennings?”

“Yes, who is this?”

“Okay, great. Don’t hang up. Hear me out. My name is Julianne Dickinson and I’m here with a friend from Pelican Pointe.”

“Is there something wrong with my family?”

“No, not at all, there’s nothing wrong with Landon, Shelby, Drea or Caleb,” she said emphasizing each name so he’d know she was for real. “As far as I know they were all fine when we left a few days ago. In fact, they painted my house.” She rattled off the address on Ocean Street to prove who she was and the story behind his family painting her house. She talked fast, afraid that he would hang up on her.

“You’re the schoolteacher who bought my childhood home?”

“That’s right. I’ve moved in, I’m happy there. My friend and I have come a long way to talk to you about all those boxes we found when we remodeled the school.” That one line brought dead silence to the other end of the line. “I’m out here at the gate. I know it’s bold of me to ask but…”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. Please leave me the hell alone.”

“That won’t work anymore, Cooper.” Running out of ideas, she bluffed. “It won’t work because Brent Cody, the police chief you talked to via email, has DNA from the bloody pieces of shirt left in the boxes.”

“Go away!”

“It’s only a matter of time before Brent shows up here. Wouldn’t you prefer to talk to us like a dress rehearsal before you get down to the gritty details with the cops?”

A long silence followed. “Are you still there?” she asked.

“Okay. Okay. I’ll be out to get you.”

“Nice fake out,” Ryder whispered while they waited.

“It’s called desperation.”

Cooper Jennings appeared on the other side of the iron fence holding a remote. When the gate clicked open, they walked up to a man with shaggy chestnut hair around his ears and bright blue eyes. He looked a lot like his siblings.

Julianne held out her hand. “It’s nice to meet you.”

“How did you find me?”

“I won’t lie. I looked up everything I could find about you on the Internet. You’re quite the photographer. When that went nowhere I hired a private detective.”

By this time they’d reached his little house. He let them inside the living room where there were trains set up all around the room, some in motion, running around track.

“Your grandfather and father adored trains, didn’t they? The deed to the shop was right there in the first box we found.”

“Why are you here?” Cooper stated bluntly.

“Someone told us you might need a friend right about now.” Julianne nodded toward Ryder. “You have two, right here.”

“What would you know about it anyway? This isn’t Facebook. I’m doing just fine, thanks. I have plenty of friends.”

Suddenly Julianne wondered how she could get this man to open up about what must’ve been a very painful time in his life. “So these friends know about what happened to your father that night?”

She watched as the grown man went white as a sheet and dropped into the nearest chair. “No one knows that.”

“Isn’t it about time they did?” Ryder pushed. “I came here to San Francisco to confront my past, a past that has nothing to do with you. We all have our demons that need put to rest.”

“Sure you do,” Cooper said with derision. “I guarantee you’ve never known a demon firsthand.”

Ryder’s eyes met Julianne’s in a worried gaze. “The point is it felt damn good to get it behind me. I happen to think you’ll feel the same if you just talk to someone about it.”

Cooper puffed air into his cheeks, scrubbed both of his hands down his face, and blew out a huge sigh. Tears formed in his eyes. “I don’t know where to start.”

“Your mother seemed…very manipulative,” Julianne prompted.

“She was, possibly the most manipulative woman I’ve ever known. Of course, I didn’t admit that to anyone until just a few years ago on a psychiatrist’s couch.”

“We couldn’t find anyone in town to deny that sentiment.”

The photographer puffed out a muffled laugh. “Oh I’m sure that’s true. No one knew what she was really capable of though, least of all her husband and children. That night, the night it happened, I was sound asleep. My dad had tucked me into bed not three hours before that. But my mother woke me up in the middle of the damn night. She was always waking us up at some ungodly hour for some stupid, ridiculous reason. Like the night my dad had packed his bags to leave after they’d had another horrible argument. But to keep him there, she ran upstairs, made us get out of bed, and then marched us downstairs like little soldiers. She told us Dad was leaving us and he was never coming back. I remember Drea and Caleb started to cry. What kind of mother uses her children like that? What kind of woman treats her kids like that?”

“An unstable one.”

“I knew even then my mother wasn’t right in the head. People around town threw out the word crazy—the neighbors, the kids at school. But I just recall thinking how mean she could be to everyone. At nine, I knew enough to know my dad wasn’t leaving us but was trying to leave her. For some reason, I understood. Of course, I didn’t want him to go. I felt guilty about that later.”

Cooper shook his head. “I knew she didn’t want to see him happy, let alone be happy with Miss Caldwell. That was the ultimate slap in the face. My mother never wanted anyone happy, least of all her own husband or her kids. All she knew was how to be miserable so she wanted everyone else to be that way, too.”

Cooper took a deep breath before he could go on. “Look, I was her son but sometimes my mother could be mean just for the sake of it. I had to accept that about her. Of course, there were always those she fooled.”

“Are you saying she fooled your dad?”

“He wanted something that wasn’t reality. Maybe he couldn’t accept how she really was. I’ve had too much time to think back to my childhood, remember her in action. I was able to go back in my mind and watch her through the years. She was happiest when she created drama. Lots of drama. I watched her lie to my father numerous times. She’d trick him into believing something that wasn’t real. I think I resented him for that, for getting fooled. I kept waiting for him to wake up, to get us away from her. But he never did.”

“Do you think medication would’ve helped her?” Julianne looked into the man’s sad eyes and watched as he sucked in a trembling breath before going on.

“She wouldn’t take it, refused in fact. I’m not sure why.”

“What happened that night when she woke you up?”

“I wasn’t sure at first what she wanted me to do. But then, she dragged me downstairs, waited like a crack addict in an agitated state for me to at least get my shoes tied. Then we trooped out the front door and down the steps. It took me a while to realize we were headed to the beach. But after we crossed the street, she led me over the rocks and under the pier. And that’s when I saw the bodies. First, I spotted my father, lying on his back. He was white as a sheet, no color in his face at all. I had no idea how long he’d been like that. Then, a few feet away, I spotted another body, a female. It looked like Miss Caldwell. I’d never seen two people dead before. It’s nothing like the movies. Her eyes were still open. But my father’s eyes were closed. Funny what you remember. I’ll never forget their ashen faces. They’d both lost too much blood to still be alive. That much I knew. It was too late to help either one of them. They were both gone.”

“That’s a horrible thing for a nine-year-old to see,” Julianne said, reaching for his hand.

“How did a woman and a little boy get the bodies off the beach?” Ryder asked.

“I helped my mother load them into Drea’s wagon. We had to make two trips.”

Julianne exchanged a shocked look with Ryder. “Oh, Cooper. I’m so very sorry.”

“No one saw you?” Ryder asked. “Julianne bought your former home. The proximity to the pier is so close it’s hard to imagine how no one heard the shots.” 

“It was the middle of the night,” Cooper said sharply. “Besides, luck always seemed to be on my mother’s side, no matter how many things she stole, there were a lot more times she didn’t get caught. This was no different. I kept waiting for someone to show up. But… No one came.”

“How long did it take you to…you know…?”

“Put them in the ground? It took us the rest of the night. We didn’t finish up until around five in the morning.”

“Where? Where did you…bury them?”

Because Cooper had a hard time going on, she said the first logical thing that popped into her head. “It wasn’t on the beach. There’s an archaeological dig very near that spot, the team would’ve discovered them by now with everything they’ve unearthed. They’ve gone down as much as ten feet. But it had to be somewhere close by.”

“We pulled the wagon back home and around the corner, used the soft dirt on top of the compost heap.”

“You buried them at The Plant Habitat?”

Despite the sick look on his face, Cooper nodded.

The three sat there without saying anything else for what seemed like an eternity, the eerie silence hanging over them like a weighted dome.

Finally Julianne broke the tension. “There’s something I still don’t understand. I’m sorry to be so insensitive about this, Cooper, but… I have to ask. Why on earth would you think to put a piece of your father’s shirt in a keepsake box, several boxes in fact? And how did a nine-year-old even think to do that?”

The grown man ran his fingers through his hair, hung his head. “Even at that young age I was ashamed of what I’d done, what I’d been asked to do by my own mother. I needed to take something away of his for myself, a reminder of what I’d done. It may sound crazy but...”

“No, no, it doesn’t.” Julianne said, patting his back like she sometimes did to console one of her students. “You were just a small boy doing what your mother asked of you, doing your best to handle a horrific event.”

“I remember digging in between all the crying. Sometimes I was bawling so hard I couldn’t see what I was doing. But when my mother went into the house and came back with a pair of scissors so she could cut off Ms. Caldwell’s hair, all of a sudden I stopped. I don’t know but something kicked in. I watched in horror as my mother went wild, kicking both bodies, cursing, pitching a fit. I knew then I wanted something of my dad’s. I told my mother I needed to take a break. She starting digging and while she was distracted, I used those same scissors to cut a piece of his shirt. The material was sticky. The dirt had stuck to it. But I didn’t care. Initially I cut out one large piece from the front and then later cut that into smaller pieces. I had these little boxes, one my dad had made especially for me. And after…after helping to bury him… I thought maybe one day Drea and Caleb might want their own box. So I squirrelled away the pieces of his shirt in mine until I could find boxes for them. I ended up locating an old metal one in the garage for Caleb. Drea had a cigar box so I used that until I ended up with four. I guess in my mind, I thought one day my mother might actually do the right thing so I made another box up for her.”