Cold Springs (35 page)

“Well?” she asked.

“Two women—neither one slapped me.”

“A record.”

Over on the deck, the upperclassmen were clowning around, slipping pieces of ice down each other's shirts. Race Montrose stood to one side—not getting teased, not participating, just standing there in his church clothes, staring into his lemonade.

“You said hello to him?” Olsen asked.

“Not yet.”

“You need to.”

He met her eyes, and the truth clicked, like the gears in one of his father's clocks. He knew he hadn't been imagining her hesitation all week. He knew what she'd been struggling to say, and it was the same thing he'd been struggling to say for years. She was giving him a chance to go first.

“I lied to you,” he said. His voice seemed to be coming out of someone else's mouth.

Olsen brushed a crumb from the edge of her mouth. “I know.”

“When?”

“A few days ago. Bits and pieces have been falling into place for a month—talking to you, talking to Mallory, seeing you from two different angles.”

“If you knew, why did you agree to be my partner again?”

She turned her face toward the upper windows of the school, where the long winter sun was streaking the glass the color of coins.

“You remind me of my stepdad,” she said. “I think I'm supposed to make it work with you. I'm supposed to be your partner, because to do that, I have to drop some serious emotional ballast. I have to be honest with myself about my past, forgive myself. Maybe it's time you did the same.”

The tire swing spun—right where John Zedman had stood wearing his kindergarten quilt, laughing and drinking champagne like there was every reason to celebrate, like guilt was not a predator that could follow a scent.

“You want the truth to come out,” Olsen said. “You tried to tell me, through that story about Thailand. There was no boy in Thailand. Hunter and you never killed anyone on guard duty. You wouldn't have let yourself get set up and framed, you wouldn't have pursued the blackmailer in the first place, if you didn't know in your heart you wanted to be discovered.”

For years, Chadwick had known the hook was embedded in his mouth—waiting for him to betray the slightest tremor, the least resistance on the line. But now that the truth was tugging at him, he was surprised to feel no fear. He was being reeled out of the pressure of the river bottom, back toward the surface, out of the darkness.

“Katherine thought she loved Samuel Montrose,” he said. “He was mean-spirited—evil. He used my daughter, got her hooked on heroin. He was taking her apart, just for the fun of doing it.”

“And you found this out
before
she died, not after.”

Chadwick closed his eyes. He remembered the car ride from Oakland, Katherine telling him so much to hurt him, so much he didn't want to hear.

“A week before,” he replied. “I didn't know what to do. I could feel her just slipping away.”

“You didn't do nothing, like your wife thought. You talked to John Zedman.”

“John said we could take care of it. John's style was to confront people, make them back off. He and I went to Oakland. We tracked down Samuel, found him in the building where he dealt drugs, the same place his grandmother still lives. He was more than we'd bargained for. We argued with him. I just wanted him to leave Katherine alone. I wanted him out of her life. He pulled a gun.”

“And so did you.”

“I did, but I didn't have time to use it. John . . . he took out a .22. I didn't even know he'd brought it. He shot Samuel in the gut. Samuel kept coming. But he didn't fire. John fired twice more, hit the kid in the chest. I remember Samuel turning from the force, turning toward me, like he wanted me to see what had happened to him. And after he fell, I watched while John pointed the gun at Samuel's head. Only afterward, we realized the gun Samuel pulled wasn't even loaded. He'd been bluffing.”

Chadwick couldn't read Olsen's face. Like a good counselor, she kept her expression nonjudgmental, calm in the face of atrocity. “You covered for Zedman. You became an accomplice to murder.”

“John was terrified. He panicked when I suggested calling the police. He kept talking about his reputation, his family. He kept reminding me that he'd done it for me. We both knew the police would never buy self-defense. It would look like we'd hunted Samuel down and executed him. So we wrapped the body—we got it into the car. We dumped it in the Bay.”

“But Katherine knew.”

“She suspected. I couldn't hide the guilt in my face. I didn't admit to anything. Katherine didn't exactly confront me, but . . . she knew. I went to Texas to try to decide what to do. I was planning on telling Norma when I got back, taking prison time if I had to. I half expected Katherine to call the police herself. But when I got home, before I could send her to Cold Springs, she killed herself. Nine years, people have been telling me her death wasn't my fault. But it was.”

The fog drifted through the eucalyptus branches across the street. Beyond the green expanse of the Presidio, the orange spires of the Golden Gate Bridge marched off toward Marin.

Olsen broke off another piece of her sugar cookie, took a bite. “That night Katherine visited the Montrose house, to tell Kindra her suspicions. Katherine wouldn't have OD'ed if Kindra hadn't supplied her pure heroin.”

“It's still my fault.”

“Kindra didn't trust her chances at justice against Zedman and you. She opted for her own kind of revenge. She became Samuel—she began torturing John Zedman. And you.”

“Call Sergeant Damarodas. Or the press. Your decision.”

Olsen sighed. “No. Not mine.”

She pointed toward the little yard. Race Montrose was climbing over the ribbon, slipping into the shadows while his peers kept up their joking and jostling, cutting glances at Race only now that he had given up trying to be among them.

In a trance, Chadwick followed him.

The yard was canopied by a huge oak tree, wedged between a high wooden fence and the building, so it was always the darkest, coolest spot at school. The air smelled of wet sand and mulch and mud from class projects and butterfly gardens. Along the wall of the second-grade classroom, where a gravel path used to be, the newly poured sidewalk glistened gray as catfish skin, its wet surface already scarred with a hundred tiny handprints and childish signatures.

Race Montrose had hauled himself up on a sand table and was sitting cross-legged, bending a frayed pink plastic shovel in his hands.

Chadwick waited for the boy to see him.

Race looked up. His features were so much like his brother's, and his sister's—the angular jaw, the street toughness in his mouth, the fire in his eyes that said
Back off.
But there was something else, too—a look of expectation, of belief, like a child staring out the window on a cold night in a hot state, waiting for that seven-year snow—not caring that it might not happen, that it had never snowed in his lifetime. Still having faith it would tonight. Samuel and Kindra never had that look. Chadwick wanted to believe it was a capacity Race had inherited, alone among all his siblings, from his mother.

He imagined the determination it must've taken her, marching into Ann's office:
I want an application for my boy.

“You were there that night,” Chadwick told Race, “nine years ago, when we shot your brother. You hid; you watched as we rolled his body in a sheet and carried him out. You've lived with that ever since.”

Race's eyes teared up—the eyes of a six-year-old child. “What are you going to do about it?”

“Apologize. But that seems pretty damn insufficient.”

Race bent the pink shovel. The handle was broken, so it looked like the link in a chain. “That day on the fire escape? I almost shot you.”

“Why didn't you?”

“Samuel used to hit me.” Race said it softly. “He used to make me carry his drugs for him, figuring nobody would arrest a little kid. Kindra was always telling me he was this great guy. He protected us. But he didn't. He scared me worse than anybody. That night you and Mallory's dad showed up . . . you were talking about how Samuel was destroying her, playing with her mind, making her think he loved her. But I didn't know who you meant. I was too young to get that it was your daughter. I thought you were talking about Kindra. You could've been.”

The breeze shook a leaf off the oak tree. It fluttered down to the new sidewalk, stuck in the wet cement like a tiny boat.

“Is that why you never told anybody?” Chadwick asked.

“I did tell someone. I told Kindra. You saw what happened.”

“I'm sorry. That isn't enough, but I'm sorry. I was trying to protect my daughter. I never meant to kill anyone.”

Race studied him fearfully, though fearful of what, Chadwick wasn't sure.

“What was it like,” the boy asked him, “knowing you killed somebody and got away with it?”

No one had ever asked Chadwick that. He had never talked to anyone about the murder—not even John. The question drew something out of him like a lightning rod, siphoning off emotions he didn't even know he'd been accumulating.

“I should lie to you,” Chadwick decided. “I should tell you I couldn't live with it. Or I should say the only reason it didn't bother me was that John Zedman pulled the trigger. The truth is, all I cared about was Katherine. Then and now. If I could have her alive again, I would change history, stop her from taking those drugs. But Samuel's death? I stood by while Samuel was murdered. I helped conceal a crime. And God help me, if Katherine hadn't died, I think I could've learned to live with it.”

Race set down the plastic shovel. He traced a figure in the sand with his finger—a picture or a word, it was hard to tell which. “What Kindra would say? You deserve to die. She would say if I didn't have the guts to kill you, I should at least tell on you.”

“Kindra could be persuasive.”

Race shook his head. “Who would it help—me? Ms. Reyes? Kindra turned into Samuel. She
was
Samuel. It scares me that I might wake up someday and hear voices, forget who I am. I'm not going to let it happen. I'm not going to do what she would've done.”

“So what will you do?”

Race glared at him, as if he'd just thrown down a gauntlet. “I'm going to finish Laurel Heights. I'm going to college. What's the best degree you got?”

“A bachelor's in history.”

“Then I'm going to get better than that. A Ph.D. And you're going to pay the cost.”

Despite himself, Chadwick felt a smile tugging at his lips. “All right, Dr. Montrose.”

“Now get the hell away from me,” the boy said. “This is my school. Those clowns out in the yard don't know it yet, but they're going to find out.”

Chadwick was gratified to realize it sounded very much like something Norma Reyes would've said.

He left Race Montrose on his sand table, small oak leaves fluttering down around him, some of them sticking in the sidewalk, making a permanent impression.

Race sat alone in the little yard, thinking about the day he and Mallory had first become friends in the second grade, right here at this sand table.

He hoped she knew what she'd done for him, how much he envied her courage. He hoped she'd find what she needed in Texas.

He got up, brushed the sand off his dress slacks. He took the key chain out of his pocket—a silver Mickey Mouse, a house key, a key to a Toyota SUV. There was a spot on the corner of the sidewalk, where the two boards met, that was as cold as a refrigerator, the cement unmarked, still almost liquid. Race knelt down and pushed the keys into the goop, then smeared the surface smooth. He pressed his hand over the spot, hoping his print would harden there—remain for years, for all time. He wrote his name with a stick—
RACE MONTROSE, CLASS OF 2006.

Then he got up. He didn't care what the kids said about his jacket and tie, or the cement on his hand, or anything else. He had things to do. He had a future ahead of him. And God help him—he was going to learn to live with it.

“Well?” Olsen asked.

“I'm done.”

She stared at him, as if weighing the truth of the statement. Then she took one last look at Laurel Heights—the old building with its ivy-covered chimney, potato prints hanging in the windows.

“It's a good place,” she decided. “But for most kids? This isn't reality. Come on—let's make our pickup.”

She took the stairs quickly, and when she looked back up at him, a small challenge in her eyes, he realized that she had already forgiven him his sins. The young always forgave quickly, always came back eventually, because what other choice was there?—even for the most wayward child, even for the most flawed parent.

“You've got two bullet holes in you,” he reminded her. “Don't you dare run faster than me.”

In front of the school, azaleas were exploding in full spring color. Premature, but then again—this was San Francisco, his old hometown. There was no seasonal compass. Maybe the flowers had been blooming all winter.

Maybe Chadwick had only noticed when it was time to notice.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

RICK RIORDAN is the author of four previous novels featuring private investigator Tres Navarre. His work has won the Anthony, Shamus, and Edgar Awards. A middle school teacher by day, he lives with his wife and two sons in San Antonio, where he is at work on his next Tres Navarre thriller.

Also by Rick Riordan

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S TWO-STEP

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THE DEVIL WENT DOWN TO AUSTIN

COLD SPRINGS
A Bantam Book / May 2003

Published by
Bantam Dell
A Division of Random House, Inc.
New York, New York

All rights reserved.
Copyright © 2003 by Rick Riordan

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Riordan, Rick.
Cold Springs / Rick Riordan.
p.                  cm.
1. Problem youth—Fiction.                  2. Teenage girls—Fiction.
3. Wilderness survival—Fiction.                  4. Fugitives from justice—Fiction.                  5. Texas—Fiction.                  I. Title.

PS3568.I5866C65 2003
813'.54—dc21
2003040365

Published simultaneously in Canada

eISBN: 978-0-553-89757-9

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