Nowhere to Hide (35 page)

Eric usually brushed aside a call coming from a person who sounded like this woman did. Those calls, however, did not involve the Archer house, a place where Dillon might be staying if he really had come back to Aurora Falls. Eric had checked the house the day after Buddy’s murder and found nothing, but maybe Dillon had simply been more careful a few days ago.

Eric strode into the main room at headquarters saying loudly, “I’m going out. Don’t need anyone to go with me. Let me know if there’s any trouble,” and managed to get out the door without anyone asking where he was going. He got in the sheriff’s car, fought downtown Christmas traffic until he’d left the business area, and headed north.

Sebastian Larke, the founder of Aurora Falls, had formed this street first and named it Holmby after his family estate in England. During his lifetime, people called it Holmby Road. Sometime after in the 1830s, citizens had renamed it Holmby Street. As Eric drove past its ramshackle houses with their peeling paint, broken front porch steps, and sagging roofs, he thought Sebastian would be saddened to see what had happened to the place he’d named after his family’s beautiful estate—an estate he was never allowed to visit after his expedition to America. Sebastian probably would have been pleased with neighborhoods like the ones where Eric’s parents lived or where the Grays lived. No, Sebastian would have been pleased by the mansions of Oak Lane before time and a flood had taken their toll, Eric mused. He’d seen old pictures. The houses had been large, elegant, graceful, and exquisitely maintained. Now they sat on a nearly vacant street. Now they sat on a street where someone had brutally stabbed to death an annoying but harmless little man named Buddy Pruitt.

Isaac Archer, Andrew and Dillon’s father, founded Archer Auto Repair when he was young and built it into the best car repair business in the city, in spite of its tumbledown appearance. Eric’s father had patronized the place, as had Dr. Gray and Mitch Farrell. Eric knew the business was lucrative, but sour-faced Isaac didn’t indulge his family. When he married pretty Belle Benson, age eighteen at the time of the marriage, he’d stuck her in the old house on Holmby Street with his stern, sharp-tongued mother, who couldn’t stand her daughter-in-law, who was cute, joyful, and not overly bright.

Eric pulled up in front of the small ranch-style house painted gray, with a rusted white wrought-iron railing around the front porch. Several roof shingles lay in the front yard and dead leaves clogged the gutters. Half-dead shrubbery surrounded the house, looking as if a fungus had ravaged it. No cars sat near the house.

Eric looked down the street and saw an extremely thin woman wearing a down coat and knit cap pretending to be checking her garbage cans, all the while throwing surreptitious glances toward Eric. Miss
Classified,
no doubt, Eric thought, and gave her a salute. She scuttled into her house and slammed the door.

He knocked on the front door of the Archer house and wasn’t surprised when no one answered. The draperies across the big front window showed discolored, rotting lining. They’d probably been hung over forty years ago, when Isaac Senior built the house. Eric couldn’t picture Isaac Junior or Senior spending any money on interior design.

Eric noticed the for sale sign that had stood in the front yard since Andrew and Dillon’s father had died three years ago. Even if the real estate market was good, the house would be a hard sell, Eric thought. The maintenance needed on this beauty would cost as much as the house. He walked around to the back, climbed two steps to a tiny back porch, and knocked on the back door that, to his surprise, clicked and opened simply from the force of the light thud.

Eric stayed on the porch but leaned into a small, dingy kitchen and called, “Anyone home?” He didn’t expect anyone to answer but decided to try one more time: “This is Chief Deputy Montgomery. Is anyone here?”

Andrew Archer walked into the kitchen looking thin, haggard, and dead eyed. “Well, Eric, I guess you found me.”

2

“Are you living here?” Eric asked after Andrew had insisted he sit on a hard, faded plaid couch.

“I don’t know,” Andrew said vaguely. “I spend a lot of time here.”

“Do you sleep here?”

“I did last night. I go back to my house, the house I shared with Tonya, but I can’t make myself stay. We were so happy.” He paused. “At least I thought we were happy.”

Eric was careful not to seize on the statement. “Everyone talks about how well you and Tonya got along. What do you mean you
thought
you were happy?”

Andrew took a minute, as if sorting his thoughts. “
I
was happy. I’d had a crush on Tonya ever since we went on those boat rides with Dr. Gray. When I went away to college, I did everything I could to improve myself. When I came back here, I heard she was in love with Will Addison. She wasn’t seeing him, but she loved him.” He stared down at his hands. “When I was certain they weren’t together, I asked her out. Things went so fast. I couldn’t believe it when she told me she loved me. But I’ve always wondered if I was a consolation prize because she couldn’t have who she really wanted.”

“I remember those river outings. Tonya tried to talk to you, but you were so shy you’d hardly say a word.” Eric smiled. “You didn’t give her a chance, Andrew.”

“I tried, but I just couldn’t get out a word.” Andrew’s face tightened. “That sure wasn’t the case with Dillon, though. All the girls loved Dillon.”

“Did they? Back in those days I didn’t notice them falling all over themselves around Dillon. They talked to him more because
he
talked to them.”

Andrew went on as if he hadn’t heard Eric: “Marissa looked at you all the time when she thought you weren’t looking at her. She’s loved you for years. But Tonya and Dillon—there was something between those two, Eric. I never saw them together. He never talked about her. But there was
something.
”

“I think you’re wrong, but we can’t know now.”

Finally Andrew seemed to come alive. “Why can’t we know now? Tonya can’t tell us, but Dillon…”

Eric felt the muscles of his whole body grow taut. “But Dillon what? Dillon will tell us?”

“Dillon might, if he feels like it.”

Eric forced himself to let a few moments pass and then ask quietly, “Is Dillon alive and in this city, Andrew?”

Andrew rubbed his big hands together and closed his eyes. “Dad was so mean to him. He wasn’t nice to me, and with Mom he was just…strange. He stared at her all the time. He never said her name. Belle. I never heard that name come out of his mouth. He didn’t beat her, though. But he did Dillon. I don’t know why, but he hated Dillon. I should have done something—I was the big brother—but I was too cowardly to cross Dad. I just watched Dad and cringed.

“So I lost my brother—emotionally, I mean. Dillon didn’t have any love or respect for me and who could blame him? And now I’ve lost my wife because I wasn’t a good husband, because I didn’t try harder to find out what was bothering her so much the last few days of her life. She had to know I’d be thrilled about the baby—she couldn’t have been worried about that. But one day someone mentioned something about Dillon and she went so white, I thought she was going to faint. If I hadn’t caught her, I think she would have dropped to the floor. I asked her what it was about Dillon that scared her, but she said she just had a dizzy spell. It didn’t have anything to do with Dillon.”

Andrew looked up at Eric with pale eyes and swollen eyelids. “But it did. When she got that photograph of us decorating our first Christmas tree and it said: ‘Hope you’re enjoying your new life,’ Tonya was so shook up about it, she brought it to the newspaper office and made me leave with her so she could show it to me. And all I did was brush it off, tell her it was a prank, anything to settle her down.” Andrew paused. “That night, someone murdered her.
Someone?
No, not just someone. Dillon.” He shook his head. “I just don’t know why he’d do something so horrible.”

Eric nodded and then spoke slowly: “Andrew, you were a wonderful husband, but Tonya was strong willed. If she didn’t want to tell you something, she wasn’t going to tell you. Period. You couldn’t cajole Tonya Ward into doing anything or saying anything she wanted to keep secret.” He waited a moment for those words to sink in. “But Andrew, you never answered my question. Is Dillon here in Aurora Falls?”

Andrew stared emptily at the floor and Eric didn’t think he was going to answer. Finally, he said softly, “If Dillon is in this city, I don’t know it. That photograph was addressed to Tonya, not me. I haven’t heard a word from him since the day he hit Buddy and jumped out of the boat.”

“You haven’t
heard
a word from him. Has he sent you even a note, some indication that he’s around?”

Andrew shook his head. “No. Absolutely nothing.” Andrew lifted his gaze and said strongly, “But when I came to this house after Tonya’s murder, I found some food and beer in the refrigerator, and a blanket and pillow in Dillon’s bedroom.”

“Why didn’t you let me know immediately?” Eric demanded.

“From time to time, vagrants have holed up in here, especially during the winter. I’ve seen that kind of stuff in here before. I didn’t think it had anything to do with Dillon. But just about an hour before you came, I found something…important. I was going to call as soon as I got my wits about me.”

“What the hell did you find?”

Andrew swallowed. “In a drawer in his old dresser, I found a…a photograph. Not an old one—something taken in the last week or so, judging by the Christmas decorations and the fake fur coat and high-heeled boots. Eric, it’s a picture of Marissa.”

3

As dusky evening floated into night, Will Addison turned into the cemetery and drove slowly to the north end, closest to the waterfall. Some people had strung tinsel and some had tied metallic balloons to gravestones, as if the bodies lying under the ground were going to rise up and have a party. Will found the practice tacky and the resulting image of partying corpses repulsive. He hoped when he died no one would garnish his gravestone with what he considered trash.

Will pulled to one side of the road and stopped the car. Then he picked up a dozen white silk lilies, their stems wrapped in green paper like fresh flowers, and walked a few feet, weaving around grave markers, feeling the short, cold grass crunching under his shoes, until he came to a small, gray granite stone reading:

JOHN DAVID ROWE

BELOVED SON

The birth and death dates showed that John Rowe had been eight years old when he died. “Eight,” Will said each year when he came to the grave at Christmas. “You never had a chance to make your life good or bad.” Will laid the lilies on the grave, touched the stone, slowly got up, and walked laggardly back to his car, as if he were an old man. He felt old tonight. He felt like he’d lived a whole lifetime in his twenty-seven years.

He lingered in his parked car a few minutes, watching the black of night pushing a rim of purple down behind the hills. With his window open, he could hear the rush of water tumbling over the falls and hitting the river. Soon they’d shine with colored Christmas lights behind them. Will preferred the white lights used the rest of the year—white lights shining pure and luminous on the sparkling veil of water.

Will didn’t want to go home. An entire evening at home nearly drove him crazy with his mother chattering while his father hid behind a tome on some war—Will thought certainly by now his father must be back to the times before Alexander the Great. Because of a trust fund left to him by his grandmother, Will had the money to live other places and had always taken advantage of that freedom.

Christmas was another matter, though. His parents insisted he be home at Christmas, and considering how little grief they’d given him over the years for his many scholastic and business failures, he thought a couple of weeks in Aurora Falls wouldn’t kill him. Besides, except for last year, Catherine Gray always came home for Christmas, too.

And Will always decorated little John David’s grave—the grave Will knew would be there for the rest of his life, haunting him, calling to him.

The memory of John’s death seemed to fill the cold night as Will reluctantly started for home. God, if only he’d gone out that night with some of his friends everything would have been different, but he didn’t have a lot of friends in Aurora Falls. He’d gone to private schools and hadn’t associated a lot with “the guys” when he came home summers. He didn’t fit in with “the guys.” He’d usually gotten along better with girls.

Girls like Melody Simmons. She danced in his dreams, drunk and loud, just as she had that fatal night. Then the dancing and singing would stop. He would see her sick and scared. Then he would see nothing except her big brown eyes, full of hatred and accusation.

Thinking of her sent him back through the years and made him remember the night she’d come to his house around nine o’clock, her long, dark hair tousled, her brown eyes sparkling, her jeans and T-shirt looking painted on her fantastic eighteen-year-old body. She was thrilled and had dragged him outside to see the silver Corvette her father had given her. Will had walked around the car, making the all the appropriate noises, oohing and aahing as he sat in the driver’s seat, looking under the hood and thinking this 345-horsepower engine was too much car for Melody, who had trouble even parallel parking.

She’d wanted them to go to the Lonesome Me Tavern to celebrate. Will hadn’t wanted to go—even under normal circumstances, Melody talked too loud, squealed, burst into song, and did just about anything she could think of to get people’s attention. On the other hand, earlier in the day Will had run into Catherine Gray, already preparing to enter her senior year of college in the fall. She’d been shopping for a birthday present for her mother and he’d invented a female cousin and asked Catherine to help him pick out a present for her.

Catherine had been even more beautiful than he remembered, serene, composed, and funny in her understated, charming way. Also, whenever they met, she somehow made him feel as if he were the person she’d most like to be with at the moment, although she never flirted. She’d intimidated the hell out of him that day as always. Still, after they’d parted, he’d berated himself for not asking her out and decided that somehow he must get up the nerve to ask for a date. He’d been mulling over the problem for hours, and having his deep thoughts about Catherine interrupted by boisterous Melody had made him irritable.