The Deepest Water (26 page)

“Abby, God, I’d do anything to have a second chance, to undo things. Anything. Going to jail would be easier than seeing you like this.” He looked agonized, a muscle twitching in his jaw, fists clenched at his sides.

She walked past him, started up the stairs. “I don’t know when I’ll come home. Monday, Tuesday. I’ll call first.”

She took a bath, went to her room and set an alarm clock for two-thirty, and went to bed. Later she knew when he came in to look at her, and she knew when he went to their room and went to bed. She dozed, came wide awake with a start, and dozed again. She hit the off button of the alarm at the first sound of a buzz.

Soundlessly, without turning on a light, she got up and slipped on her robe, crossed the hall to the bedroom door and listened. He might have heard the alarm, soft as it was; he might be awake, also listening. When she heard his gentle snore, she backed away, and went into his room.

She didn’t waste a second getting into his computer, starting her search in the
Failsafe
file, where everything he had deleted was waiting for her. She stifled a groan when she saw that in addition to the Langdon account there were three others from his office. She didn’t stop to examine them, but moved on down the list of deletions. Games. Of course, he couldn’t bear the thought of being ridiculed for playing adolescent computer games; he would have taken them out. She would examine them, also, she decided; it was easy to label something whatever you wanted, try to hide it behind a false name. She moved on. A lot of Bookmarks from the Internet; she started down the list to visit each one, find out what it was about.

A chat group about sports cars… A page from a car broker’s web site, price quotes… An understated page about yachts, luxury vessels that would sleep forty on their trip around the world… She sighed and moved on….

Minutes later she stopped moving altogether, stopped breathing, even her heart tried to stop, with heart quakes, sharp jumps that shook her body; it found its rhythm again and she could breathe.

Inflatable canoes. A page of inflatable canoes. Collapsible to backpack size, inflatable in minutes, with compressed air in seconds, seven feet long, twenty-seven pounds, under three hundred dollars…

Order forms for mail, phone, e-mail purchases. Or visit the showroom in Seattle.

She was numb, no feeling in her hands or feet, her legs were gone… She felt the room shifting, tilting, and pressed her head down on the keyboard. When she pushed herself upright again, the screen was garbage, and she began to shake.

Out! Get out! Now!
Almost as if someone else had marched in and started issuing orders, the words came to her. She exited the program, stood up, paused at the door only a moment to listen, then ran across the hall to her room.
Get out! Get out!

Fumbling with clothes, she dressed as fast as she could, grabbed the mahogany box, motioned to Spook, and left the house. She coasted down the driveway, down the street to the intersection with Willamette, and only then started the engine, but she knew minutes later that she had to go somewhere, had to stop and think. She didn’t even know where she was; no familiar landmarks, no familiar store fronts, hardly any other traffic. It was four-thirty in the morning and she had to go someplace where she could stop the chaos of her mind, stop and think.

Ahead she saw a sign for an all-night restaurant, a doughnut and hamburger place, and she pulled in.

“Honey, you look like you’ve been on the road for a long time,” a middle-aged waitress said when Abby sank down into a booth. “You want coffee?”

She nodded. That was exactly right, she thought; she had been on the road for a long time.

Finally she began to sift through the blizzard of thoughts. Call Caldwell. And tell him what? That Brice had surfed the Internet, looked at yachts and sports cars and inflatable boats. She remembered phrases Caldwell had uttered: hard evidence, good defense attorney, cause for a search warrant… He suspected Brice, she thought then, but he couldn’t prove it. She could hear another voice in her head, like a distant echo:
“No! No! Brice had an alibi. He wouldn’t have done that! He couldn’t have killed my father!”
But that was what Caldwell’s visit to her had been about, to get her help in finding evidence he could use against her husband.

“When you want something to eat, just holler,” the waitress said, placing coffee in front of her.

He had an alibi, she thought. He couldn’t have gone to the cabin. He wouldn’t have done it. Flesh of her flesh, body to body, his hands on her, hers on him. He couldn’t have done it! Although the coffee was bad, it was hot and the jolt of caffeine was welcome. Against her will, she found herself visualizing that day a month ago, what Brice could have done.

When she leaves for the museum he follows her out quickly and is on the road before nine, in Portland by eleven, in the motel minutes later. He goes to his room and orders lunch from room service, takes off his jacket, takes papers from his briefcase and spreads them on the bed, then tips the bellboy lavishly when he brings the food. So he’ll remember.

No motive, she told herself, just what he could have done.

He hangs the
Do Not Disturb
sign on the door, clears off the bed, turns down the covers, probably packs up the sandwich to eat later, and he takes a nap. That must have been his reason for going to Portland so early when their meeting wasn’t scheduled until three in the afternoon. Time to take a nap.

He could do that, take a nap whenever he lay down, fall into sleep like a child.

From three until nine-thirty or ten he is with his associates.

It was before ten, she thought; the other times he had gone up to the meetings, they had broken up before ten and he had arrived home by midnight at the latest, even if he had told the police it had been after two. Why hadn’t she contradicted him? Because it had seemed irrelevant then. The group had been together for hours, there would have been little reason to linger for more hours over dinner. Maybe none of the others had even noticed precisely when they separated.

By ten, and more likely before ten, back in his room, he orders a large pot of coffee, and when the bellboy brings it, another big tip, more papers spread around, the bedspread in place hiding the fact that the bed has been slept in already, wet towels in the shower, soap tossed in the shower. Then, moving fast, change clothes again, pick up papers, pack up, put the coffee in a thermos, or simply dump it out, throw the bedspread on the floor in a heap. Everything used, everything normal. A few minutes at the most. The sign still on the door. He doesn’t take it down when he leaves.

Three and a half hours to the lake, at the minimum, the lieutenant had told her. They must have timed it. He could have arrived at the lake by two. Florence Halburtson said that Coop usually got up between one and two, but they had not looked at the clock. How long to get from the car to the water? To inflate the canoe? Ten minutes, fifteen? In a real canoe it would have taken only minutes more to cross the finger and get to the cabin, but an inflatable one wouldn’t be as swift, she felt certain, and Brice wasn’t an expert. Fifteen minutes?

He gets out of the canoe, says something to Spook, and she doesn’t bark; she knows him. He goes inside the cabin and locks the dog door, gets the gun from the drawer, and the minute Jud appears at the bottom of the stairs, he shoots him.

Abby shuddered, spilling coffee. She mopped it up with paper napkins. Did he call him, “Jud, I have something to show you.”

He runs up the stairs, grabs sheets of paper from the stack, removes the disk, and turns off the computer, then runs back down and out. Ten minutes in all? Fifteen? Back across the finger. How can he know where to go ashore again? Coop’s light would carry to the first low spot above the water, but dimly. He could have tied something to the tree roots, something that would have reflected the light, served as a guide. He steps out of the canoe, pulls the plug on it to let the air out, and hurries back to the car. The canoe will finish deflating while he drives.

She shook her head. It would have taken at least an hour from the time he arrived at the lake until he left again. There wasn’t enough time for him to go back to Portland, and then drive to Salem and get there by seven-thirty. He had to have stopped to change his clothes; he wouldn’t have gone through the woods, out in the canoe, and back in his good suit and shoes and not leave a trace for a sharp-eyed detective to notice; he needed time to hide the canoe in the trunk; everything he did would have added minutes. She grasped at the fact; there wasn’t enough time. The police must have gone through the same kind of reasoning; they must know there simply wasn’t enough time.

“He didn’t go back to Portland. He drove directly to Salem,” she said under her breath. Two and a half hours. She knew how long that took; she had done it in an old car, in heavy traffic, and in no particular hurry.

He had plenty of time, she thought bleakly, time enough to stow the canoe in the trunk, shave, change his clothes, freshen up.

Caldwell knew that, she realized, but there must have been witnesses in Portland who would swear he had spent the night in the motel. The maid, the bellboy. No one knew when you checked out of a motel; you used a credit card, and the next morning you got up and left. He had kept a log of a trip to Portland and back, miles, gas, everything, and he had receipts for lunch, coffee, breakfast in Salem. Business trip, tax deductible, he had explained to the sheriff: he always kept a careful record.

The inflatable canoe on the Internet wasn’t enough proof to counter his records, possible witnesses. He might even claim he had thought about ordering a canoe for her, for Christmas.

The waitress refilled her cup and Abby shook her head, nothing to eat.

Another memory surfaced, and she narrowed her eyes recalling it. He said he had gone to Jud’s lawyer’s office to ask about the cashier’s checks, and she had accepted that without question. But it was a lie, he would have known the lawyer wouldn’t tell him even if he knew. He must have gone to find out what the two different waiting periods meant, six months and thirty days. She could imagine the scene, Brice sincere and puzzled, asking on her behalf what they meant; they had been in shock, without any understanding of the legalities before. And he found out, she told herself, that she couldn’t even borrow against the estate until after the thirty days had passed. Until then nothing was hers legally. That explained the loan coming up now, to be finalized exactly thirty days after Jud’s death. It would have been impossible sooner.

She thought about the four accounts he had deleted, and wished she had paid more attention to the numbers, the figures. How much did he have to put back before the auditors arrived? Evidently, at least a hundred thousand had to be in place next week some time. His desperation was real. But what if there was more?

Would he push her for more loans in the coming weeks? And if she balked, refused, there was no possibility that he could raise more money unless she died. And, she added slowly, she couldn’t die too soon, not before Sunday.

She had signed the loan application, reassured that since it was in her name, she would have time to think it through at the cabin, and that he couldn’t touch it if she changed her mind. But if she died and the money was in her account, he would inherit it as well as Jud’s estate. It would all be his. He could borrow in his own name, hire a good defense attorney, if it ever came to that.

But it wouldn’t come to that; Caldwell needed hard evidence and he didn’t have any. He didn’t have enough to show cause for a search warrant.

Her stomach was churning, and abruptly she felt she was going to be sick, she would throw up here at the table. She jumped up and nearly ran to the women’s room, and stood in a stall taking deep breaths with her eyes closed.

She was spinning a theory, she told herself, exactly the way Brice had spun theories, each one more incredible than the last. He was a liar and a thief, but a killer? Hurt and betrayed, outraged, she had taken a theory past belief without a thing to go on except the fact that he had looked at inflatable canoes and had tried to conceal it. She should have stayed home, she thought then, looked further.

She left the stall and stared at her reflection in the mirror over the sink: gray-faced, wild-eyed, almost unrecognizable. She shook her head. “He did it,” she whispered. She remembered what Matthew had said when they were splitting up, and he had begged for another chance. “You win a little, lose a little, and it’s a game, just fun. Then you lose a lot and you try again, to get it back, because you know your luck will change again. It always does. You feel lucky this time, really lucky. You have to keep trying to win it back because that’s the only way you’ll ever come out ahead. Luck. I know better now. I’ve learned my lesson.” But he hadn’t learned anything. He had taken the rent money and tried again.

Brice was in too deep. Time had run out. His luck had run out, just as Matthew’s luck had run out. Her father had said she didn’t learn a thing the first time, and that was wrong, she thought, remembering the bitter fight they had had. She had learned never to try to come between an addict and his fix. The addiction would win every time. What she hadn’t learned was how to recognize an addict in the first place; they came in many guises.

She dashed cold water on her face and dried it, and when she looked at herself in the mirror again a little color had returned to her cheeks, and a hard glint was in her eyes. “You married the same man twice, idiot. And this time there’s no one to bail you out.”

She knew now that in heeding that voice of command in her head, she had done the right thing, the only thing possible: run. If Brice had seen her, if she had confronted him, he would have done something drastic to the computer, gotten rid of everything, finished covering his tracks. But as long as he didn’t suspect anyone could find what he had hidden, it would be there next week, next month. And she desperately needed time alone, time to find a way to prove what she knew. Caldwell couldn’t do it, and unless she did, Brice would get away with the murder of her father.