Tumbledown (14 page)

“Do we need anything from the store?” she said, trying to pretend it was a regular Saturday.

“No,” Sarah replied absently, looking out the side window at Robbie Duggan as he spat in their direction. Robbie was seventeen and had an impressive rap sheet for petty larceny. Alex had arrested him three times in one record-breaking month. “Maybe milk.” Sarah fixed her gaze forward. “I can’t remember. It doesn’t matter.”

There was no way Alex was letting her drink her tea black. That really would be the final insult. She pulled into a gap in front of the store.

“Sit tight. Any problems, hit the horn.”

Sarah managed a thin smile. “My hero.”

The store was dim and cool, smelling pleasantly of fresh fruit and baking bread. It doubled as a general and hardware store, selling everything from household essentials to DIY goods and animal feed. What it didn’t stock, its owner could usually procure. Everyone in town went there for their basic groceries and to catch up on the local gossip, and everyone standing in its aisles or at its counters turned to stare as Alex picked up a basket. She walked across to the dairy fridge and selected her milk. Then, too stubborn to be hounded out, she chose a loaf of bread and asked for pastrami at the deli counter. The young assistant blushed to the roots of her hair and accidentally dropped her gum into a dish of olives as she weighed the order. No one else spoke to Alex. As she waited at the cash register for longer than was customary, she picked up a copy of the local newspaper.

Lyssa’s murder was splashed across the front page, accompanied by a picture of her wearing her uniform and an ear-to-ear grin that made Alex want to scream at the senselessness of everything that had happened. A breathless editorial was crammed with hyperbole but little in the way of verifiable facts. When Alex reached a quote from an anonymous source who cited a sordid lesbian affair as a possible motive, she threw the paper down and wiped her hands as if they were soiled.

Jenny—the store’s owner—hurried out from the back room, the stink of cigarettes still clinging to her hair. She stopped short upon seeing Alex, but then smiled and took her basket from her.

“You look so tired, dear,” she said, and the warmth in her voice brought a lump to Alex’s throat. “How’s Sarah holding up?”

“She’s doing okay.” Alex handed over a ten-dollar bill as Jenny rang up the total.

“Such a terrible thing. That girl of yours has nothing but sweet in her. You tell her from me to hang in there, okay? It’ll come right in the end.”

“Thank you. I’ll tell her. I promise.”

She carried the bag out into the late morning heat and waved as Sarah smiled and waggled three bandaged fingers at her.

“Thought you’d got lost,” Sarah said as Alex opened the door.

“Lost, or tarred and feathered?”

“That too,” she admitted. She shivered, and Alex saw there were goose bumps covering her arms, but she seemed to relax a little as Alex started the engine and reversed out onto the street.

“Jenny says you’re to ‘hang in there,’” Alex told her.

“I’m trying.” She turned toward Alex, her face pale and drawn. “Please don’t let me fall.”

*

There were still several police officers searching the woods along the track to the cabin, but Lyssa’s body and her SUV had been removed. Tobin was the only one to raise a hand as Alex drove past; the other officers and volunteers turned their backs or averted their gaze.

“I guess the longer they’re out here, the safer we are,” she said.

Sarah nodded distractedly, trying not to focus on the crime scene tape or the markers indicating the tire indentations where Lyssa had stopped her SUV. It occurred to her that they were the only such markers she had seen.

“Why haven’t they found evidence of another vehicle?” she said. “Whoever killed Lyssa must have driven down the track.”

“Did Tobin drive right up to you last night?”

Sarah grimaced, seeing the relevance of the question: that the mere act of responding to her 911 call had made Tobin contaminate the scene. “He kept everyone else back a little, but he drove pretty close.” She heard the tires splash through a waterlogged pothole. “And then it rained.”

“Yeah.” Alex drummed her fingers on the steering wheel. “Unless they initially parked off-road somewhere to wait. But if so, how did they get Lyssa to stop? The easiest way to do that would be to block the track with their car.”

“Risky if the first person to come along wasn’t one of us…” Sarah’s voice trailed into nothing. She took a shaky breath. “So, I guess that’s what happened.”

“Yeah, I guess.” Alex sounded as if something still nagged at her, but her face brightened when they turned the final corner and saw Tilly trying to chew through her leash in her efforts to reach them. Someone had fastened the leash to a tree, and Tilly wasn’t at all happy about it. Alex parked and went straight over to release her.

Still standing at the side of the Silverado, Sarah stared at the cabin. Outwardly, nothing had changed. The cats were asleep on the bench, the chickens were roaming freely around the lawn, and the cans she had rinsed out ready for recycling lay undisturbed by the back door. It was only when she started to look for what wasn’t there that she began to notice differences. The picnic blanket was missing from the lawn, along with the cooler and the utensils she and Lyssa had used for lunch. The door to the small shed where they kept garden tools was ajar, and she tried to damp down a mounting sense of dread as she watched Alex jog across to it. She knew exactly what Alex would be checking for, and was unsurprised when she came back out empty-handed.

“Son of a bitch.” Alex shook her head as Sarah walked across to her. “They took Walt’s box.”

“They’ll have to give it back to you,” Sarah said, deliberately not mentioning the real reason behind Alex’s reaction. The hand-carved wooden box had been a leaving gift from Walt, and Alex had barely used the Bowie knife it contained, preferring to keep it in pristine condition. Now it could be used to prove that Sarah was in possession of the type of weapon used in Lyssa’s murder.

“Come on.” Sarah held out her hand. “I’ll make a brew.” The reversion to her natural accent made Alex react with mock horror. Sarah shrugged. “Fuck ’em,” she said. “If our cover’s blown, then I’m done talking like a bloody southerner.”

Alex pulled her into a hug. “That’s my girl.”

Inside the cabin, the signs of disturbance were far more blatant. Furniture sat at strange angles and drawers were half-open, their contents messily rearranged. When Sarah reached the bedroom, the sight that greeted her made her waver at the threshold.

“Can they do that?” she whispered.

The bed had been stripped bare, the sheets and pillowcases presumably taken to examine for DNA evidence. The insinuation made her light-headed. She slid down the doorjamb to sit heavily on the floor.

“Put your head between your knees,” Alex murmured, rubbing Sarah’s back.

Despite everything, Sarah smiled, remembering another time, another place where Alex had given her exactly the same advice. She leaned back into Alex’s body and felt Alex’s breath on her cheek.

“Come a long way since then,” Alex said, and Sarah could tell she was smiling too. She gently tilted Sarah’s face and kissed her. “I’ll find some fresh linen. You go put the kettle on.”

Sarah nodded her agreement, but she was painfully aware that they were on borrowed time, that sooner or later Quinn would be knocking on the door. Alex must have shared the sense of inevitability because she tightened her hold.

“Or we could just stay here a little while longer,” she said, and kissed Sarah again.

*

Sarah brewed a pot of tea and made sandwiches from the pastrami. Having remade the bed, Alex met her in the kitchen and they took their lunch out onto the back porch. Neither explicitly stated that the cabin didn’t feel like their own anymore, but Sarah had an almost unbearable urge to disinfect everything it contained, while Alex had looked relieved at the suggestion they eat outside.

Once Sarah was sitting on the bench in the fresh air, Bandit’s attempts to steal a tidbit and Tilly’s watchful presence at their side helped her relax slightly. She finished her sandwich and bit into an apple. Alex was nursing her tea, her gaze intermittently flicking toward the driveway as if she expected Quinn to come storming up at any moment. The last time he visited the property he had had to phone ahead so they could unlock the gate, but Sarah didn’t think he would be quite so courteous this time. She took a final bite of her apple and threw the core onto the grass for the chickens to fight over.

“Alex?”

Alex blinked and turned to her expectantly; whatever she had been thinking about, she evidently welcomed the interruption.

Sarah faltered, reconsidering what she was about to ask, but Alex noticed her hesitancy and set down her mug. “Go ahead,” she said.

Despite the words, there was a wariness to her tone that made Sarah shift uneasily.

“Sweetheart, just ask me,” Alex said.

Sarah nodded, still reluctant to raise the issue but torn by her genuine desire to know. “What happens when you arrest someone?” she said.

For a second, Alex just stared at her. Then, apparently reaching a decision, she leaned forward until her elbows were on her knees, and interlaced her fingers. From there she could no longer see Sarah, which seemed to be enough to allow her to speak.

“To make a planned arrest, we need enough evidence to determine probable cause, and then we usually need a warrant. That’s something a judge like Buchanan has to issue. Once we have that, we go to the suspect’s address with whatever backup Quinn deems necessary. Whether we knock or break down the door depends on the suspect.”

“I would hope we’d get a knock,” Sarah murmured, but she saw Alex tense. She reached out to rest a hand in the small of Alex’s back.

“Someone will read you your rights,” Alex said, showing no awareness of having switched pronouns, “and then…” She gave a half-shake of her head. “And then they’ll probably handcuff you and take you to the station to be processed.”

“Processed,” Sarah repeated numbly.

“Fingerprints, mug shot, formal interview with the assistant district attorney—that’s the State prosecutor. It’ll be similar to last night, only no one will pretend to be your friend, and you can have a lawyer to advise you.”

“I already told them everything that happened. They obviously don’t believe me, so am I best just to say nothing?”

Alex leaned back and opened her hands. “I don’t know. Sometimes silence can be seen as incriminating in itself, but then you can’t be tripped up that way.”

“If I don’t answer, they’ll assume I’m guilty.” In a no-win situation, that seemed worse to Sarah than having the police twist her words to suit their own ends.

“If they’ve arrested you,” Alex said quietly, “then they already think you’re guilty.”

“Yeah, I suppose you’re right,” Sarah conceded. She felt weirdly detached, like an observer watching the proceedings but not really connecting with them. She knew that if she let down her guard and allowed herself to become emotionally involved, she would lose the ability to cope with what was happening to them both. “How long can they keep me, or detain me, or whatever? I’ll get bail, won’t I?”

For a moment, Alex didn’t answer.

“Oh shit,” Sarah said, the reason for Alex’s reticence suddenly becoming clear to her.

When Alex did speak, her words sounded strangled. “In Maine, murder is considered a non-bailable offense.”

Sarah turned her head sharply, not quite able to believe what she was hearing. “And that’s it? They just lock me up? What the fuck happened to innocent until proven guilty?” A small, sensible part of herself said that she should have expected this, that someone accused of stabbing a young woman to death would not be allowed to walk free until the date of the trial. If she had been a member of Lyssa’s family and not the one who had been falsely accused, she would undoubtedly have approved of the state’s hard-line stance.

“There have been cases,
rare
cases,” Alex emphasized, obviously not wanting to raise false hopes, “where a judge at the Superior Court has used his discretion to grant bail. I’m not an expert, but I think your lawyer would have to challenge the evidence in a special hearing and either convince the judge that there are exceptional circumstances in your case or argue that the indictment was wrong, that there isn’t enough evidence to warrant a murder charge.”

Sarah didn’t know much about the American justice system, but she could guess that if it was anything like the process in England such an appeal wouldn’t happen overnight. “So whatever the fuck they decide, I’ll be in jail for weeks for something I haven’t done,” she said. It seemed so much safer to hide behind anger than give in to the terror, but she tried to control her temper, aware that Alex was the wrong target.

“None of that is going to happen,” Alex told her, though her tone held little assurance. “We’ll find some way to stop it all before then.”

Sarah couldn’t imagine how stressful it must have been for Alex to have kept this knowledge bottled up in an effort to protect her. She felt like she had scraped the surface off a fresh wound and then rubbed salt into it just for spite. She laid her hand on top of Alex’s. “Hope for the best but prepare for the worst, then?”

Alex nodded mutely.

“Okay, so we better get started and find me a bloody good lawyer.” Sarah tried to sound positive, but the facade slipped as she put a hand into her pocket for her cell phone and remembered that Quinn had taken it at the meeting that morning. When she thought of strangers searching through her photographs or personal messages, it made her want to smash something hard and heavy, preferably on Quinn’s head.

“We can use my phone.” Alex was watching her carefully. “If you’re gonna break something, make sure it’s something we don’t need, okay?”

Shielding her eyes from the sun, Sarah looked at her. “Am I really that easy to read?”

“You do tend to wear your heart on your sleeve,” Alex said. “It’s one of the things I love most about you.”

“Maybe you should write me a character reference.”