Guilty as Sin (5 page)

But Kate didn’t need to hear the words to know that her worst fears had come true. She could see it in the way her father’s face drained of color and his skin slackened, aging him a full decade in seconds.

She could hear it in her mother’s frantic “No, no!” and the way she buried her face in her hands as she slid to the floor.

Kate rushed forward. “What—what is it?” She knew the answer. But something inside her needed to hear the words spoken out loud.

“Michael’s dead,” her father said in a voice that sounded ripped from his chest. “Flannery killed him, then killed himself.”

Kate felt like a giant fist had closed around her lungs, robbing her of breath. No, no, the denial echoed in her head, but all she could do was sink to the floor and struggle to breathe. Her mind raced with a million simultaneous thoughts, wishes, prayers.

Let me go back and do it over again and I’ll make sure nothing happens.

Please, God, let this be a mistake.

Take me instead. Let him come back and take me instead.

She didn’t know how much time had passed before she heard a car approach and a knock on the door. Her mother sprang to her feet and raced to the door. Her father followed more slowly, as though he could delay facing reality.

As the door swung open, Kate saw the broad shoulders of Sheriff Lyons. Photographers snapped frantically from
behind, bathing him in a strobe of light. He stepped inside, his face pulled into a solemn mask of grief.

Kate’s mom backed away until her knees hit the couch and she collapsed back onto its cushions. Her father sat beside her. Sheriff Lyons took a seat in the armchair and rested his elbows on his knees, his back bowed as though he bore the weight of the world on it.

Kate and Lauren hovered anxiously in the doorway. Kate reached out blindly with her hand, her eyes filling with fresh tears when she felt her sister’s cold fingers twine with her own.

“We found Flannery’s truck parked in front of his trailer about a hundred yards from where the fire road dead-ends into a hiking trail. About thirty yards in is a small cabin that the forest service and hunters still use. We found Flannery and Michael inside. Michael was tied to the woodstove.”

“How—” Her mother’s question choked off on a sob. “How did he die?”

The sheriff hesitated. “You sure you want to do this right now?”

“I need to know everything,” her mother said, her voice rising. “He was my baby, and I need to know exactly what happened to him.”

If her father felt the same, he didn’t show it. He sat statue still, his gaze locked on a point somewhere over the sheriff’s right shoulder.

The sheriff’s gaze flicked to Kate and Lauren.

“Go upstairs, girls,” her father said, barely audible.

“No, I—” Kate started.

“Get the hell upstairs!” her father roared, and sprang to his feet so quickly Kate jumped back a foot. “After everything you’ve done, the least you can do is listen to me!” The vein in his forehead was back, along with the rush of florid color in his cheeks.

Kate and Lauren sprinted up the stairs to their room. But no sooner had they shut the door than Kate carefully pushed it open and slipped out into the hallway. Lauren joined her, and soon they were perched on the third step from the top, hidden from view but able to hear everything.

“Michael was shot at point-blank range twice, once in the chest, once in the head,” the sheriff said, unable to keep the quiver out of his voice. “Flannery then turned the gun on himself. He left a note,” the sheriff continued, “apologizing for what he’d done, explaining that he was going to put himself down to keep himself from hurting anyone else.”

Kate’s mother made a sound like a wounded animal that shook Kate to the bottom of her soul.

Kate felt like she was being sucked into a black hole. She must have made a sound, because her father’s gaze snapped up to the gallery to where she and Lauren listened. The white-hot anger in his eyes was so fierce, Kate was sure there was going to be nothing left of her but a pile of ash.

When he spoke, his voice, though quiet, seemed to echo through the room. “It should have been you.”

Sandpoint, ID

Present day

A
s Kate Beckett steered her rented sedan off Highway 95, she felt her stomach clench with dread. Though she’d had nearly an hour and a half during the drive from the airport in Spokane, as she pulled off the highway and headed for the center of Sandpoint, Idaho, her heart rate doubled and the lump in her throat threatened to choke her.

While her dashboard display claimed it was a toasty eighty-three degrees outside, typical for the end of August, even in the mountains of Idaho, Kate felt like ice water was pumping through her veins, her fingers numbly clutching the steering wheel as she glanced down at her phone to double-check the directions.

Her route took her through the center of town and past Sandpoint’s City Beach. Fourteen years had passed since Kate had been here, and she felt she was seeing the town as though through a dream. Everything at once searingly familiar yet oddly different as she cataloged the changes the town had undergone in a decade and a half. First Street was still crowded with tourists, as it always was in summer, families enjoying the last gasps of summer on the lake before school started.

The shop that had once sold beautiful hand-sewn quilts was now occupied by a Starbucks. But there was still a line trailing down the block in front of Ike’s ice cream store. Kate watched two teenage girls and a boy, tanned and waterlogged from a day on the lake, towels draped around their necks, emerge from the shop. As they laughed and jostled each other around licks of enormous soft-serve cones, Kate felt her chest pinch and a burning behind her eyes.

How many times had she, Lauren, and Michael finished up a day of water-skiing and suntanning with chocolate dip cones from Ike’s? They had been that carefree, that joyful, completely unaware of the asteroid hurtling toward them, moments away from blowing life as they knew it to smithereens.

Kate gave herself a mental shake and continued along the lakeshore. She needed to keep a sharp eye out for street signs, not lose herself in wallowing in the past.

The truth was, anything and everything in Sandpoint—from the way the piercingly blue sky competed for brilliance with the azure of Lake Pend Oreille, to the scent of the air—sunbaked earth mingled with crisp pine—to, yes, something as simple as the sight of an oversize ice cream cone—could send her hurtling back into the black hole if she let it.

But right now there was no time for that. Now she had to be strong, focused. Another girl, another family needed her and her expertise. She needed to be completely focused on getting her back to safety. To save the girl who still had a chance and waste no time grieving over the one who was long gone.

Kate turned down Kootenai Bay Road and tried to calm the trembling in her stomach. She knew this road, which wound its way through one of Sandpoint’s most luxurious developments, all too well. She knew so many of these houses, houses occupied by her “lake friends,” as she, Lauren and Michael had called them. Families who, like Kate’s,
had rented the same houses at the same time every year, until they’d formed something of a community, albeit one that only lasted a month or so out of every summer.

Once Kate and her family had been deeply entrenched in that community. But after the tragedy—as Mother called it—it was as though the previous seven summers hadn’t existed, as though she and her sister and brother hadn’t spent eleven months of the year anticipating the one they would spend here. This part of their lives—all the joy, friendships, everything—had been excised from their existence like a cancerous tumor.

She’d often wondered if their little community had gone on without them. She knew some had reached out to her parents and tried to keep in touch, but only because Kate had found cards and letters unopened in the trash. Put there by her father’s social secretary as per his and her mother’s instructions.

Did the Michaelsons still rent number 293? she mused as she drove by a familiar, massive post-and-beam house that edged up onto the lake.

There was another, even more impressive log home two houses down. Did the Burkharts, who lived most of the year outside of San Francisco, still own what they loved to call “their little lakeside retreat”? Did teenagers still gather around their bonfire before pairing off into the darkness to make out?

At the thought, a face flashed in her brain. Dark eyes sparking with amusement, a flash of white teeth against tan skin. Tempting her to sin even as she knew there would be hell to pay if she ever got caught…

She gave herself a mental smack, sent the image fleeing.

She pulled up in front of number 540, which, had been rented by the Cunninghams the last summer she’d spent here. Kate hadn’t spent much time there since the Cunningham kids were a few years younger. But her brother,
Michael, had made fast friends with the oldest, Billy, the summer they were both eleven and had spent the next two summers having sleepovers here when they weren’t watching movies and camping out in the Becketts’ spacious rental about a quarter mile away.

She noticed the sheriff’s car parked along the curb as well as the news van and the small throng of reporters and felt an eerie sense of déjà vu. Though she dealt with reporters all the time, seeing them in this setting was unnerving. Reminding her, reminding the world, that even in an idyllic setting such as this, evil could still lurk in the shadows.

She pulled into the driveway and braced herself before knocking. The noise from the crowd hit her like a wave as she marched determinedly up the front walkway. The press, anticipating her arrival, came at her like a swarm. She pushed her way through, ignoring their questions and saying only “I won’t be making a statement until I meet with the family and the local authorities.”

She barely had time to knock before the door swung open, revealing a middle-age woman dressed in khaki shorts and a light blue polo shirt. “It’s good to see you again, Kate. Come on in.” The woman gestured her in with a sweep of her hand. “Though I wish it could be under better circumstances,” she quickly added.

Kate cocked her head at the woman’s greeting. Kate was on television often enough that occasionally she was recognized, but the familiarity in the woman’s voice and smile said that she should know her. She studied the woman’s face for a moment, and then she got it.

Trade in the salt-and-pepper hair for dark brown and erase a decade and a half’s worth of lines from the woman’s face, and Kate recognized Tracy Albright who ran the quilt shop—now Starbucks—down on Main Street. “It’s nice to
see you too, Mrs. Albright,” Kate said, smiling automatically though it felt strained at the edges.

She waved a hand. “Oh, call me Tracy. You’re not sixteen anymore, and having a grown woman call me Mrs. Albright makes me feel about a hundred years old!”

“Are you a friend of Mr. Fuller’s?” Kate asked as she followed Mrs. Albright—Tracy—through the slate-tiled entryway to the great room that adjoined the kitchen.

“Not exactly,” Tracy replied over her shoulder as Kate took stock of the house where Michael had spent so much time that last summer. Though Kate herself hadn’t spent tons of time here, she’d visited often enough to notice the changes. The layout of the house was the same—a massive great room with a stone fireplace adjoined the kitchen and was the center of the main floor. A wooden staircase led up the hall to the second floor with a gallery looking over the great room and two bedrooms on either end. A hallway off the great room led to two more rooms.

Two sets of sliders offered an unimpeded view of the lake and the Bitterroot and Selkirk Mountains above. Outside, the house was surrounded by a wooden deck with stairs that led down to the communal dock reserved for the houses clustered along this stretch of beach.

And across the lake, Kate could see dozens of Jet Skiers and power boats. In two weeks the lake would be virtually empty, no one left but the locals to enjoy the mountain paradise.

The mission-style couches and tables Kate remembered were gone, replaced with an overstuffed leather sectional and love seat. The kitchen, she noticed, had been completely remodeled. The terra-cotta tiles she remembered had been replaced by hardwood floors, the appliances all shiny stainless steel, the kind you’d find in a restaurant kitchen. Yet
more evidence that life here had continued after the Becketts had left.

“After I sold the shop last summer, I thought I’d spend my retirement kicking back on the boat in the summer and cross-country skiing all winter,” Tracy said as she led Kate down the hallway off the great room. “But turns out after working my tail off every day for thirty years, I don’t have much patience for sitting around on my duff dangling a fishing pole over the side of the boat. I was bored stiff after just two weeks. Not to mention Art—my husband,” she clarified, “thought that since I was home all the time, it meant I was going to turn into his personal servant. Got all ticked off when I wouldn’t cook him a hot lunch every day. Thirty-five years of marriage and I’ve never made him a hot lunch, and suddenly I’m supposed to be Betty Crocker?”

Despite the circumstances, Kate felt the corner of her mouth quirk up at the woman’s exasperated yet affectionate tone. She’d forgotten that about this place, how friendly the people were, inviting you into their homes and sharing confidences as if you were lifelong friends even if she hadn’t set foot in the town in fourteen years.