The Deepest Water (27 page)

21

At ten-thirty on Friday morning Felicia pulled into the Halburtson driveway. Where it split, one part going down to the boat shed and carport, and the other around the front of the house, she followed the one to the front door. Willa was in the passenger seat, composed, but very pale. Felicia patted her leg.

“We won’t stay long, a few minutes only,” she said. There was an explosion of sound, a shot that echoed and reechoed around the lake and cliffs. Almost immediately there was another gunshot. “Good heavens! What on earth…?”

Coop’s dogs bounded up through the woods at the side of the house barking, and the poodles in the back seat barked excitedly in response.

“Stop that nonsense,” Felicia said crossly, getting out of the car. All the dogs stopped barking, and now she saw that Spook was there; Abby had arrived already.

Willa got out more cautiously than Felicia had done and the three big dogs came to sniff her, accepted her, and escorted the two women to the door, which Florence was opening.

No one said Florence was fat; they said she was stout, or that she had put on some weight, or that she was heavy-set, but in fact at forty to fifty pounds overweight, she was fat. She wore her gray hair in a braid coiled on her head and looked like an aged Brunhilde. Holding a conversation with her was a trial, Felicia had decided long ago, because Florence seldom finished a sentence, and her thoughts seemed to jump from one subject to another in a manner that suggested she was paying little attention to what she was saying. It wasn’t her age, or the onset of Alzheimer’s, or anything else ominous taking a toll; she had always been like that.

Florence embraced Felicia warmly, then tentatively embraced Willa, who appeared just as tentative about the gesture. Another pair of shots sounded, fainter now that they were inside the house.

“Who’s that shooting?”

“Coop. Take off your things. I’m making muffins…”

“What on earth is he shooting at out there?” Felicia demanded as another shot sounded. “If he hasn’t hit it yet, he isn’t going to.”

“Nothing. He isn’t shooting anything. Huckleberry, the last of them. Cleaning out the freezer. Abby’s with him, and they’ll be cold… Is there snow in the pass? We might hit it down around Klamath Falls. And coffee… You have our key, don’t you?”

Felicia and Willa took off their coats and put them down on the sofa, then followed Florence to the kitchen; she was rambling on, but Felicia decided to wait for Coop to come in and tell her what was happening.

This was a good house, she reflected, built back around the turn of the century when finishing details had been important, and craftsmanship counted. Hickory wainscoting, oak and mahogany floors that had turned almost black with age but were as beautiful as they had been when the house was built, high ceilings and tall windows with wide window seats. The kitchen floor was inlaid linoleum in a speckled pattern, fifty years old or more, waxed to a high polish. Florence and Coop had raised three sons in this house, and when the boys had grown up, married, moved away, they had come home often with their children, and the house accommodated all of them. The rooms were big, there were four or five bedrooms on the second floor, and a partly finished attic, and all the rooms used to get filled with laughter and fun-loving children and their parents. Now the grandchildren had their own children and the visits had become more and more rare. The big old house seemed preternaturally still and lonesome. Then Felicia heard what Florence had been rambling on about: Abby intended to buy the house.

“…what she’ll do with it. I know what Jud planned some day. An art colony.”

Willa was nodding sadly. “He would have done it eventually. I told him I’d teach courses, and Abby probably would, and maybe Felicia would do workshops on illustrating children’s literature…” She looked at Felicia. “He thought maybe he’d talk to you some day about being the administrator, when it was closer to the time to start. He didn’t want anything to do with paperwork, he said.”

Florence began talking about the meter man; the meters and the service boxes were side by side on the back wall of this house. “Coop had to show Abby the electric boxes, and circuit breakers… “Felicia always thought that was the real reason Jud wanted the property, not only to keep the ramp, but because it would have been a problem to move the electrical service if strangers bought the house. An art colony, she mused, that was more his style. It would have been for Willa and Abby, of course. She walked to the back door and gazed out. Florence took muffins from the oven; they smelled wonderful.

“…no fuses any more. Isn’t that strange? He’d come in with a bucket of huckleberries, and sit there at the table and wait for me to make muffins…”

Abby and Coop came into sight on the path from the back of the boat shed. She was carrying a shotgun. The dogs romped around them as they came up the path, apparently deep in conversation. She nodded at something he said. From the kitchen door Felicia couldn’t see the ramp or the cabin, the boat shed was in the way, but out in the other direction she could see some of the lake, black water today. Some days from here it looked azure. It all depended on the sky, the cloud cover, whether the sun was bright… She turned away from the door.

When Abby and Coop came into the house, her face was fiery red from the cold, and Coop had a blush on his nose and cheeks, but hardly noticeable; his skin was so weathered and brown he seemed almost impervious to weather.

Abby was surprised to find Felicia and Willa in the kitchen. She looked at the shotgun she was holding, and said with a shrug, “Coop insisted that no one can stay around here without a gun of some sort, and the police still have the rifle. He was showing me the difference between shooting a shotgun and a rifle. I may never be able to use my right arm again.”

“See,” Coop said in his deliberate way, “you don’t have to hit anything. I never did, and I never intended to, a shot in the air will do the trick. It will scare off whatever might be prowling around, and if the first shot doesn’t do it, you want to shoot closer, at the dirt in front of the critter. That’s going to do it.” He was peeling off layers of outer wear as he spoke.

Abby had taken off her gloves, but that was all. Now she went to Florence and hugged her. “Remember, write—let me know how your trip was, how you both are. And don’t worry about me. Coop’s good old gun and Spook, that’s all I need.” She hugged Coop, who looked slightly embarrassed but hugged her back. “If she forgets to write, it’s your job. Thanks for the use of the gun and the lessons.”

She looked at Felicia and said, “We’ve had a long talk already, and I have to get started on things. I’ll call you in the next day or two. Now I’m off.”

Florence pressed a paper bag of muffins into her hand, and walked to the door with her, then stood there watching for a time. When she turned to the room again, her eyes were filled with tears. “Now, you two can stay for a bit, can’t you? All those warm muffins…”

Willa nodded, and Felicia, who had been watching Abby, sat down abruptly at the table, and she thought with certainty: She knows. Abby knows.

She had turned the heat down too low, Abby thought when she entered the cabin; it was freezing cold inside. Trying to ignore Spook, who was racing around looking for Jud, she adjusted the thermostat, and without taking off her jacket yet, she checked the kerosene supply for the oil lamps, the way Jud always had done after an absence of a few days. Abby hadn’t remembered to do this when she brought Christina here, but today day she was methodical about checking out the cabin, making sure it was prepared for any emergency. Outside, she looked over the supply of firewood, neatly stacked and covered with a tarp. They usually burned wood for heat and didn’t rely on the electricity; Jud had said the exercise of collecting firewood and cutting it up was an absolute necessity for him, and besides, wood heat was best. After she carried in wood, she unloaded the boat and took everything inside, stowed the groceries away, cleared an end table and put the mahogany box on it, and finally she hauled the boat to a higher ledge; the lowest one had several inches of water on it now. She started a fire in the woodstove. Soon the cabin would be warm enough to turn off the electric baseboard heaters and she would take off her heavy jacket and boots. She made coffee and sat at the table gazing at the lake, and now she let herself think about Brice.

Ever since she left the restaurant in Eugene, she had shied away from thinking about him, about what she should do, what she could do, instead she had planned her next few days, apportioned time, so much to reconnect the old computer and reformat the hard drive to obliterate everything on it, so much for the paperwork upstairs, so much for deciding what to keep, what to give away, what to put in the box she had bought, what to do with all the material Christina couldn’t use… Each day would be filled.

Driving, she had almost stopped and turned back to Eugene; she should change her will, she had thought suddenly, then she had continued driving. She apportioned time enough to write a new will in longhand, and even planned how to keep it safe until a later date. She would mail it to herself in care of Felicia. It would be dated, of course, and the canceled stamp would be proof enough. She had learned how a lot of Jud’s money would be used, the Xuan Bui Institute, but what had he planned for the rest of it? Coop Halburtson had given her the answer when she told him and Florence that she intended to buy their house when and if they decided to sell, exactly as her father had planned. And Coop had told her about the art colony, the first she had heard of it. The colony would be for Felicia and Willa, and her, of course, she added. Coop said that Jud thought the world needed educating about how to read, and how to see clearly, and an art colony would be a step in that direction. Right, she told herself. It would be.

Realizing she had shied away from thinking about Brice yet again, she forced her mind back to him. There weren’t any guidelines for her situation, she thought bitterly. Call Caldwell, and say, my husband killed my father. And he would say, but we can’t crack his alibi. Tell Brice to his face, you killed my father. They would yell at each other, and the following day it would be as if she had said nothing. Wait for him to try to kill her. He might put it off for a while, she thought, but eventually it had to be done.

She put herself in his place, trying to think his thoughts. All that money, the trouble he was in—there wasn’t any other solution. He couldn’t wait out the six months, and she probably couldn’t or wouldn’t borrow enough to cover all his debts. Also, she must suspect him or she wouldn’t have walked out.

She stopped her chain of thoughts and considered that. Of course, she would leave him; he was a liar and a cheat, a thief, an embezzler, and now she suspected that he had become involved in day trading. He scorned the idiots who got hooked on video poker, the lottery, slot machines; he was far too intelligent for those brainless games. He understood stocks and bonds; he could beat the system, and he was lucky. Would all that have been enough to make her walk out? She didn’t know. In him she had found what she had been looking for: peace, a good and satisfying sex partner, someone to share the hearth and home… They might have worked something out, since after her disastrous first marriage, she had been desperate to make the second one work. But he had killed her father. She thought this icily, without any doubt, with as little feeling as if she were considering the probability of sunshine in summer, or rain in winter.

Then, remembering that she was trying to think like Brice, she went on: If she suspected him, sooner or later she would tell the police, and once they became really suspicious they would start a full-scale investigation at the office, one which would uncover irregularities. Self-preservation was instinctual, a duty that had to be undertaken, regardless of how repugnant it appeared. Poor Brice, forced to kill his wife. How he would suffer, because he really did love her. But if it had to be done, why wait?

Not Friday night, too soon. Probably not Saturday night. He couldn’t be certain when the Halburtsons would leave. Besides, everyone said Jud died on Friday night, but it had been on Saturday morning actually, another day to wait. Best to avoid even a remote possibility of the technical problem of when the thirty days ended. Sunday night then. Their neighborhood was very quiet on Sunday nights; he could slip out and back in without being seen. Two hours both ways, a snap. Row over in his little collapsible canoe, do what had to be done, and get out. He would have an alibi, of course.

Almost gently she reminded herself that she didn’t really know; she could be as wrong as he had been with all his theories. Her gaze came to rest on the shotgun she had placed on the table along with a box of shells Coop had given her. All she had said to Coop was that she regretted the rifle the police had taken away. It had been enough. If it hadn’t been enough, she would have asked if she could borrow it.

She worked on the discarded computer first, disconnected cables, reconnected others, brought up the systems information, then a file or two. She had been right. Everything written before twenty months ago was still on the hard drive. She hesitated, but only briefly; what was the point in printing out anything else, just to bury it? She reformatted the disk drive, returned all the cables to their rightful places, and it was done.

In the afternoon she sorted papers, separated out stories from private matters. The box she had bought to hold his private papers was filling and she worried that it might not be quite big enough. It was a poor companion to his box, but the best she had been able to find. The wood was pale, intricately carved, just as the other one was, but it had been carved for the tourist trade, and that made a difference.

No longer reading every word, she found the work of sorting was going faster than she had thought it would. When she grew tired of reading, she roamed the cabin, fingering objects that he had liked enough to keep. There weren’t that many, although there was a ton of books. A mantel clock that was wrong as often as it was right; he had had to reset it frequently, but he had liked it, and paying much attention to the time had never been one of his virtues. She checked it against her watch and reset it. Several framed pictures of her at different stages, a baby, first-grade age, teenager, a more recent one of her swimming in the lake… On the dresser in his room a framed studio picture of Willa; she was radiant and lovely in it. Next to it a carving from Bali, a white bird, possibly a crane. For years it had been attached to a piece of driftwood, then it had been broken off the base, and he had made a frame to hold it. The frame was very simple; the bird hung from the top by a nearly-invisible nylon string, free to move in all directions. He had glued the frame back onto the driftwood, as white as the bird. She touched it and it swung to and fro. It was so lightweight, so beautifully balanced, it responded to the most gentle breeze.