The Deepest Water (31 page)

She shook her head, her gaze fixed on the big rowboat on the lake. She was as pale as death.

“Take her back to your place,” the sheriff said to Felicia; it was no longer just a suggestion. “I’ll send one of the boys over to see about the car, keep an eye on it until Lieutenant Caldwell gets here.”

They sat at the table by the back window. Felicia made toast and spread butter and jam on a piece and put it in Abby’s hand; she took a bite, then put it down. Willa put coffee in her hand; she sipped it, and put it down.

They saw Caldwell arrive, followed by another state police car, and soon after that a man drove stakes into the ground and strung a crime-scene tape. Caldwell and the sheriff stood together, watching the rowboat, the onlookers stayed behind the tape. Two more state cars arrived, and Detective Varney appeared, talked with Caldwell, then left again with several men.

The men in the rowboat dropped the grapple into the water, rowed the boat a foot or two, drew the grapple up, dropped it again. Now and then the grapple appeared to be snagged on a rock or something and the men had to reverse their direction, maneuver to free it again, then they resumed their search.

At twelve-thirty they stopped moving forward, and began to pull up the grapple line slowly, three men struggling with it, until they got it out of the water. The mass they pulled into the boat was shapeless, black, big, and dripping water.

Felicia took Abby’s arm and drew her away from the window as the men began to row toward the boat ramp.

Half an hour later Caldwell came to the cottage. Felicia met him outside on the front stoop of the cottage. Caldwell looked tired, and he looked very angry.

“It’s Brice, isn’t it?” Felicia said. He nodded. “She knows, Lieutenant. She saw her car, and she has been putting things together for herself. She knows.”

“You told her your suspicions about him,” he said harshly.

She shook her head. “Yesterday we buried her father; Willa, Abby and I buried him up in the forest. We had dinner in the cabin, the three of us, then she rowed us across the finger and we came home. Brice’s name never was mentioned all day. I haven’t said a word to her about him. But she saw her car over there. It certainly wasn’t there when Willa and I left. She knows.”

He started to move past her, toward the door; she caught his arm. “Was he carrying the gun?”

“There was a forty-five in his pocket,” he said, still harsh, still angry. He pushed the door open and entered the cottage.

Abby, seated at the table, watched silently as he strode across the studio with Felicia at his side. Felicia pulled a chair close to Abby’s and took her hand.

Caldwell drew in a breath, then said, “Mrs. Connors, there’s no easy way to tell you this. We’ve just recovered your husband’s body from the lake. I’m sorry.” He sat down across from her. Abby bowed her head and didn’t move again, or make a sound. “Can you answer a few questions?” Caldwell asked after a few moments. She nodded.

He asked questions, and Felicia held Abby’s hand as she answered. She might have been holding an ice sculpture, but Abby’s voice was steady if faint. She told Caldwell about the shotgun that Coop had insisted she take, and about the call from Brice, then, startled, remembered that she had not reconnected the phone. Willa looked at Felicia, agonized, and Felicia knew what she had to be thinking: even if they had seen the car lights, they wouldn’t have been able to call Abby in time. They would have had to come back to the cottage to look up the cell phone number.

“So his message is on the tape?” Caldwell asked.

“Yes. I thought he was at Eddie’s house, passed out. He couldn’t drink really.”

Finally Lieutenant Caldwell stood up. “I’ll have to have that tape with his message,” he said. “And the shotgun. Are you going to stay at the cabin now?”

“No,” Willa said quickly. “I’ll go with her to get her things and then take her home with me. She can’t stay up here, or at her house.”

Abby didn’t protest. Instead, in a voice that had become even fainter, she said, “Lieutenant, if I give you permission to search my house, the computers, whatever you want, do you still need a search warrant?”

He regarded her steadily for a long time, then shook his head. “No. Let’s go to the cabin now,” he said. While Willa and Abby were getting their jackets on, and Willa collected the few things she had brought to the cottage, he stood looking down at the small fantastic models on the work table; then he asked Felicia, “You going to be here later on?”

“Yes. I’ll be here.”

Dusk was gathering before he came back, no longer angry looking, but tired. Without waiting to be asked, he took off his jacket and sat at the kitchen table. “She went back to Eugene with Ms. Ashford,” he said. “She said she’ll be back and forth a lot in the months ahead.”

Felicia nodded and poured coffee for them both and sat opposite him, also looking out. No one was on the lake now, no boats, no onlookers on shore. A fine rain had started to fall.

Without glancing her way, the lieutenant said, “We were checking out everyone who drove a Buick to that Portland motel the night Connors stayed there. A tourist was willing to swear he saw him leave before seven that morning. What he saw was a silver Buick and a man in a dark suit, but he would have been hard to shake unless we found another Buick, another driver. And we were running down everyone who bought a collapsible canoe or boat of any sort west of the Rockies during the past few months. We had that narrowed down to two possible customers, one’s off to Alaska or someplace, the other used a pseudonym: Robert Langdon. We were doing that before you called me with your theory about Brice Connors. Plodding, laborious work.” He sighed heavily.

“But you let him come out here with a gun,” she said bitterly.

“I had people keeping an eye on him,” he said. “What they saw was Connors drive to the Blankenship house, park at the curb, and go in. Later a car came from the garage with two people, neither one was Connors; it left and then come back with just the driver, Blankenship. Connors had been in the back seat, lying down, according to Blankenship. He and a friend took him home and dumped him on the couch and he was out cold, they thought. Blankenship took the other guy home, and went back to his own house. Our guy was still watching the Buick.”

“And Brice slipped away in Abby’s car,” Felicia murmured. “With a gun in his pocket and a canoe in the trunk.”

He nodded, almost absently, it seemed. Still not looking at her, he said, “The sheriff thinks he had a few drinks, came out with the gun, maybe to harm her, and then was overcome by remorse, and turned away from the cabin, maybe headed for the break and miscalculated. The little island is just about all under water, invisible, and he rammed into it. He couldn’t free the canoe from inside, so he climbed out and slipped into the deep water. The shock of ice water, the heavy clothes he was wearing, they kept him from climbing back out. That’s how your sheriff has it figured out.” He glanced at her. “I keep thinking of what you said early on, that you’d like to see the murderer with an anchor tied to his feet and dumped into the deepest water.”

She had to think back a moment, then she shook her head. “I said something like that to the young lady detective, not to you.”

“Like I said, Varney’s young and pretty, and a good detective. After a couple of days she’ll drive the little sports car back to Eugene. She’ll like that.” He finished his coffee, then eyed her speculatively. “You believe he suffered remorse?”

“Of course not. You have to have a conscience to suffer remorse.”

“Conscience. Guilt and conscience. Real driving forces, aren’t they? One or the other—both—can ruin a decent person’s life for all time.”

Felicia stood up and went to a cabinet. “I’m going to have a drink, Lieutenant. What I can offer is Scotch and water, or wine. Are you on duty? Or do you want one, too?”

“Scotch and water,” he said without hesitation.

She put ice in glasses, added Scotch and filled them with water, then sat down again. “Did you ever track down that blond man?”

He nodded. “Weeks ago. It was like you said, a family matter.” He picked up his glass and tasted his drink. “I read once,” Caldwell said after the first sip, “that if you’re lost in the forest, you should sit still and let searchers find you, or you just wander in circles. I suspect the same thing’s true if you’re rowing around in the dark, you just row in circles until you run into something.”

He drank again. “That’s good,” he said. “Just what I needed. You ever go down in a cave?” He didn’t even glance at Felicia, didn’t wait for an answer. “You get down in it and the guides turn off the lights, and for the first time for most folks they experience real darkness. The total absence of light. The old saying, you can’t see your hand before your face? True. You can’t. City people don’t know what that means, not really. Low dense clouds, no light to bounce off them to light up a little of the landscape, total darkness, that’s how it must be out like this. Like being deep in a cave.”

He gave her an oblique glance, then looked away again. She didn’t move. “I keep wondering how and why Connors ran up onto the little island like that, far enough to make it necessary to get out of the canoe to free it. Seems to me he would have been paddling along, not too fast in that little rubber canoe, not fast enough that his forward momentum would have carried him up on the rock before he felt a bump, enough to back off. He could have felt a bump, reached out, expecting to be at the ledge back of the cabin, and felt the rock, pretty much like the lowest ledge behind the cabin. Couldn’t have seen it, or he would have known he was off course. He could have reckoned he had reached the place he was aiming for and climbed out, pulled the canoe out, and stepped backward, into the deepest part of the water. And once he was in the deepest water, that’s all she wrote.

“Of course,” he said reflectively after a moment, during which Felicia didn’t stir or make a sound, “it wouldn’t have been that dark, not with lights on both sides of the finger. The utility company says there was no outage, anything like that last night. And the circuit breakers, the main switches in the electric service boxes, they’re all okay. I checked. Even checked for fingerprints, nothing but smudges.”

She didn’t say a word. Across the way the tops of the trees were black against the gray sky, but already the base of the trees, the basalt, the lake were merging, becoming one. Soon the trees would be one with them, and there would be only the enveloping darkness. She loved this time of day, when everything merged and became one.

“I keep thinking of Abby Connors up in that cabin alone with her dog and a loaded shotgun,” Caldwell said. “She’s what, twenty-eight? A long life ahead of her, fifty years, sixty? A long life.” He finished his drink, put the glass on the table and stood up. He gave Felicia one of his thoughtful looks. “Would she have shot him?”

For a long time Felicia didn’t speak, but finally she stood up also, and she said, “Yes.”

He nodded. “I’ll be running along now. Thanks for the coffee, for the drink.”

“Lieutenant,” she said, going to the door with him as he pulled his jacket on, “is the case closed now?”

“Paperwork to clean up, reports, wait for auditors’ reports, a bit of tidying up to do, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s closed.” He opened the door, then looked at her once more. “You take care, Mrs. Shaeffer.”

25

On Tuesday Abby went to her house to meet Lieutenant Caldwell and get a receipt for whatever he wanted to take away, and she knew that Willa had been right; she could not stay in this house a single night. She would have to come back later and pack her belongings, and then she would turn it over to a real-estate agent, and never come back.

While Caldwell and his team made their search, she listened to the answering machine messages, two from friends that she skipped over, one for Brice that she skipped, and then Harvey Durham, Jud’s attorney was speaking.

“Mrs. Connors, will you please give me a call at your earliest convenience. Following the instructions of your father, I am to deliver a letter to you in person on Monday.” The call had been placed on Friday.

She closed her eyes in relief. Harvey Durham would know what to do about a funeral, about Brice’s parents, about the house. She sat down in the living room to wait for Caldwell to finish. His team had already taken out some clothes, papers, Brice’s computer; when he entered the living room he was holding keys. “A mini-storage place,” he said, “and his car keys. Duplicates. We found another set in his pocket. Have you decided what to do about his car?”

She shook her head.

“I’ll have someone bring it around and put it in the garage.” His cell phone rang and he answered, turned away, speaking in a voice too low to catch. When he looked at her again, he said, “Mr. Connors was carrying the gun that killed your father. They just phoned in the results.”

Now she was in Harvey Durham’s office, and the attorney was deeply shocked. He was in his sixties, with unruly white hair, a paunch, very pink cheeks. He held her hands and led her to a chair as if afraid she might collapse as she told him what had happened at the lake, and that Brice had killed her father.

He would arrange everything, he assured her; he would get in touch with Brice’s family, arrange to have them take care of the funeral; of course she should not attend; he would take care of the house and car, meet with Brice’s attorney…

Then he said, “Your father gave me explicit directions some years ago, three years ago, my dear. I am to shred a document in your presence, and deliver to you a letter.”

Three years, she thought numbly, before he and Willa had gotten together, but after Abby and Brice were married. That was when he had added the thirty-day contingency clause to his will, a year after she married Brice. She nodded and watched as the attorney fed a manila envelope into a shredder that turned it into confetti. Then Harvey Durham handed her a sealed envelope.

“I’ll leave you alone for a few minutes,” he said, and walked from the office.

Slowly she opened the envelope and took out several sheets of hand-written papers.