Promise Not to Tell: A Novel (20 page)

I
STOPPED AT A PAY PHONE
off the highway to call home at just after six. The name on my bandaged chest burned like a hundred bee stings. I had been hurrying back to New Canaan, hoping to beat the snow that the deejays kept warning about on the radio. They reported that it had started to snow in southern Vermont and the storm was working its way up. It was going to be a messy night. The forecasts reminded me of what Ellie had said about people blaming bad weather on the Potato Girl. Maybe this was Del’s storm coming.

“Hi, Raven. Just me checking in. I’m on my way back.”

“Kate! It’s good you called. There’s been an accident.”

“Mom?”

“No, no, not Jean. She woke up just after you left and has been in her studio painting all afternoon. No more redecorating. She’s been very calm. It’s Nicky. He wrecked his truck earlier this afternoon. It happened just after you left. Right by the waterfall.

“I remembered the chimes on Jim’s scanner.

“Jesus, is he all right?” I held my breath, fearing the worst.

“It was a bad accident, but I guess he’s going to be okay. He has a broken ankle. Some cuts and bruises. They’re releasing him from the hospital. He’s been calling every twenty minutes to see if you’re back yet. The phone’s been driving me crazy, ringing off the hook. He was hoping you would pick him up. He said he
needs
to see you.” Her voice was childishly sarcastic as she spoke this last line.

“Well, if you’re still okay with my mother I’ll swing by the hospital and pick him up.”

“I’m fine, Kate. I’m still waiting for Opal. She took off on her bike just before I came to sit with Jean. She’s supposed to meet me here for supper. I made ratatouille. We’ll save some for you and Nicky.”

T
HE
ER
NURSE
went over Nicky’s condition with me, telling me they hadn’t ruled out a concussion and giving me a list of warning signs. When I told her I was an RN, she seemed relieved.

“Then you know he needs to be watched overnight.”

“He can come stay with my mother and me. We’ll take care of him.”

She led me into Trauma Room 3, where Nicky was resting on a gurney. There was a cast on his left foot. His face was cut and swollen. He had seven stitches over his left eye and two in his left earlobe. He smiled when he saw me.

“Hiya, Desert Rose. Looks worse than it is. I really don’t feel all that bad.”

“No, I don’t imagine you would, with all the pain meds you’re on. What happened, Nicky?”

“Tell you what, you take me outta here and we’ll talk in the car. My place isn’t all that far if we take the back roads.”

“Uh-uh.” I shook my head. “You’re coming to my mother’s. You’re in no shape to be by yourself. In the morning, we’ll swing by your place and pick up a few things. You’ll stay with us as long as you need to.”

“Well, Nurse Kate, I guess I’m in good hands. I woulda had the accident sooner if I’d known it meant I got to shack up with you.”

He grinned up at me from the gurney he was stretched out on.

The nurse came back in and had Nicky sign his release forms. His gun was being held by one of the cops on duty at the ER, and she told us how to get it back from him. An aide wheeled Nicky out to the car while I carried his crutches and pain medication. I also took charge of the gun, telling him it was out of the question with his pain meds.

“As I recall, you’re a hell of shot,” he said. “I could be in danger.”

I tucked the gun into the pocket of my parka after Nicky showed me that the safety was on.

Nicky managed to maneuver himself into the front seat and get his seatbelt on. The first thing he asked me for when we pulled out was a cigarette.

“I don’t have any. We can stop on the way and pick some up.”

“A bottle of booze, too, maybe. I could use a drink.”

“Not with the narcotics, Nicky. No booze. You’re loopy enough. Now are you going to tell me what happened?”

He was quiet a second.

“Well?” I asked, impatient.

“All right. I’ll tell you. You’re probably about the only one who might believe me, what with all the weird shit you’ve been through lately. I told the cops I swerved to avoid a dog in the road, but that wasn’t how it was, Kate. I was driving home from your place this afternoon, right? And I was thinking things over, kinda lost in my own thoughts. Thinking about you mostly. About last night.” He reached out, put a hand on my thigh, and squeezed. Then he began running his fingers slowly up my leg until I clamped down with my own hand, stopping him.

“So what happened next?” I asked.

He took his hand away, looked out the windshield into the black night.

“Then I got to the turn by the river, right where the waterfall is, you know?”

I nodded, thinking of the postcard of the old waterwheel Ellie had had in her hands earlier. The place Nicky described was the spot in the photograph.

“And damned if this little girl doesn’t run out into the road. She ran right in front of the truck, Kate. Fast as a fucking coyote. I jerked the wheel hard to the right. Just instinct. The next thing I know, the truck’s headed down the embankment and I’m rolling. I guess I blacked out or something. When I came to, the truck was right side up in the middle of the river beside the waterfall. Thank God it’s not much of a river, the water only came up to the top of the wheels. The windshield was shattered, it seemed like there was glass and blood everywhere. I wiped the blood out of my eyes and looked out the side window and there she was, just standing there at the top of the bank, laughing. It was Del. It was my fucking little sister. I blacked out again and the next thing I knew, Jim Haskaway and a couple of other firefighters were pulling me out, strapping me down on a board.”

I didn’t say anything, just gripped the wheel tighter and stared out into the dark road ahead of us. It began to snow.

“I know what you’re thinking,” Nicky continued. “You’re thinking I imagined it. Hallucinated. But damn it, Kate, it was Del standing there looking down at me just as sure as you’re beside me right now. It was Del.”

The truth was, I believed him, but found it more comfortable to stay in the well-rehearsed role of skeptic. It made the whole thing a little less terrifying.

“And you hadn’t been drinking?”

“Christ, Kate! I’d just left your house. I was stone-cold sober! All I had in my belly was the tuna sandwich and glass of milk you’d given me.”

It was snowing harder and driving was like captaining a spaceship moving at warp speed through the stars. I slowed down to a crawl, afraid I’d lose sense of where the road was.

“I have one more question,” I told him.

“Fire away.”

“Do you know who Opal’s father is?”

I took my eyes off the snowy landscape in front of me and focused on Nicky for a few seconds. He began moving around like he was trying to get comfortable, but wasn’t having much success.

“I know. Raven told me. She told me at Daddy’s viewing, of all places. I think she came to the funeral home just to see for herself—to make sure he was really gone. Hell, probably half the people in that room came for the very same reason. My father was no saint. He hurt a lot of people in his day—me and Del included. He used to treat us worse than dogs when he’d been drinking. And sometimes at night, I’d hear him go into Del’s room. I knew what he was up to. But Del never said a word, and neither did I. So when Raven told me what he’d done to her, I wasn’t all that surprised.

“I don’t know what it was Raven expected from me but whatever it was, I couldn’t give it to her. I couldn’t apologize for him, or explain why he was the way he was. Then, when she told me she was pregnant and that she was going to keep the baby, I about shit. I offered to help, you know, give her whatever money I could, but she refused. Guess she didn’t want anything to tie an innocent baby to our fucked-up family. I don’t blame her. I just wished there was more I could do for her.”

Nicky and I were silent the rest of the way home. I left the car running while I went in to buy a pack of cigarettes at Haskie’s. I was relieved to see a teenage girl behind the counter, no sign of Jim. The lights in the antique shop were off. Ellie had gone home, too.

When we got to the bottom of Bullrush Hill, I looked past the destroyed mailbox and the swinging sign at the Griswolds’ place and saw movement in the yard. It was dark and the snow was heavy, but I was sure I caught a glimpse of a fair-haired child disappearing behind the back of the house.

“Did you see that?” I asked, hitting the brakes. The car skidded about two feet.

“What?” Nicky followed my gaze over to the ruin of his old house.

Del. It was Del.

“Nothing, I guess. Must have been an animal.” I decided Nicky was agitated enough without me telling him what I thought I had seen. Maybe it had been an animal after all and my eyes were just playing tricks on me. The driving snow made it difficult to make things out, gave everything an ethereal, dreamlike quality. Del’s storm.

I stepped on the gas and continued up the hill, the rental car’s tires slipping and spinning in the snow.

R
AVEN WAS FRANTIC WHEN
we got back to my mother’s. Gabriel was with her in the kitchen.

“Opal is missing,” she said. “She’s just gone. I’ve called all her friends. No one’s seen her. She’s been gone four hours now and she wouldn’t be out on her bike in this weather. Something’s happened.”

Nicky sat down awkwardly at the table, resting his crutches against his chair.

As much as I wanted to tell Raven to relax and that Opal was going to turn up fine any minute, I knew immediately that it wasn’t true.

“Have you called the police?” I asked.

“Of course,” Raven said. “The detectives said not to be concerned yet, but they’re planning to stop by in an hour or so anyway to take a look at the knife I found.”

“Knife?”

“I found this in your mother’s locked drawer when I was cooking this afternoon. It’s not hers. I’ve never seen it before.” Raven held out a sealed plastic bag with a small paring knife in it. I recognized it as the one my mother was using to slice strawberries on my first morning home. The morning after the murder. My mind flashed to how disheveled my mother had looked with leaves, dirt, and what appeared to be dried blood on her bandages. Had my mother gone into the woods and found the knife there?

Another, more horrifying thought surfaced: one that I’d been pushing back for days. Had my mother used the knife? Was it possible that this frail, sick old woman could be the one who killed Tori Miller? She was clearly out of her head most of the time, but capable of murder? I doubted it.

But if, somehow, Del had gotten inside her…

“There’s a small piece of blond hair caught under the handle,” Raven said. “If you look carefully, you can see it.”

I held the bag in my hand and searched until I saw that Raven was right, there was a fine strand of hair there. Pale blond.

“I don’t suppose you know where the knife came from?” Raven said, and I shook my head.

“It’s been here since I have,” I told her. “We used it to make strawberry pancakes my first morning home.”

Raven squinted at me, took the knife back, and tucked it carefully into her purse.

“We’re going to go take a drive around in the Blazer,” Gabriel said. “See if we can find any sign of Opal.”

“Do you want me to come with you?” I asked.

“No,” Gabriel said. “You stay here and look after your mother. We’ll let you know if we find anything.”

“Be careful out there,” I said. “The roads are getting pretty slick.”

“I’ll go warm up the car,” Gabriel said, leaving us.

Raven hurried into the front hall for her coat and boots. I followed at her heels. “There’s ratatouille on the stove—your mother wouldn’t eat. She worked on her painting till about six thirty or so, then went to her room to lie down. She said the painting was done.

“Kate, one more thing.” Raven was doing up the top button of her coat. “I’m curious. Where’d your mother find that old badge?”

“Badge?”

“Yeah, she’s got some rusted sheriff’s star pinned to her shirt. Looks like a kid’s toy. I thought maybe it was some old thing of yours.”

I stared dumbly at her, as if she had been speaking some strange tongue.

I wondered if Raven had ever heard about the little detail of the missing star in the unsolved Griswold murder case. If she had, then surely she would have had the police waiting for me with handcuffs and leg irons.

“I’m just worried she’ll hurt herself with it,” Raven explained. “The points look pretty sharp. You might want to try to take it away.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. “I’ll get it away from her.”
Damn right I will. Especially with the police on their way.

When Raven left, I went into the kitchen, hurriedly scooped some ratatouille into a bowl for Nicky, and told him I was going to go change my clothes. I needed to be alone with my thoughts for a minute.

Opal was missing. I knew the killer had her. I had a lot of jumbled pieces of the puzzle spinning around in my head, but some of them were beginning to fit. I knew the next step was to talk to my mother. But first, I wanted to take a look at her finished painting.

The thought of going into the studio alone frightened me, but I wouldn’t drag Nicky along. This was something I had to do on my own. Besides, I told myself, it was only a painting.

“Aren’t you having anything to eat?” Nicky asked as I put the bowl down in front of him.

“No. I ate up in Burlington,” I lied.

“What’d you do up there anyway? Raven told me you went to see an old friend. Was it Mike? Did you find him?”

“No. I went to his shop, but he wasn’t there.” The second lie came easier than the first. It seemed easier and safer than to go ahead and tell him everything I’d learned and all the things I was beginning to suspect.

“Be right back. I’m just going to change.”