The Slow Burn of Silence (A Snowy Creek Novel) (18 page)

“Sometimes a little white lie can be the right thing in the long run. Because right now, it’ll give Jeb time to show everyone that he’s perfectly innocent.”

“Rachel.” His eyes narrow. “Stop. We need to talk—”

“What do they think you did?” Quinn’s eyes pierce Jeb’s.

I see the tension tightening in his jaw, his neck.

“They’re confusing him with someone else, that’s all,” I say, getting to my feet and holding out my hand. “Come. We need to get you upstairs and changed before Brandy arrives. Jeb is leaving anyway.” I glare at him.

But Quinn hunkers into the sofa. “My mother sent him. He’s not a bad man. He’s an angel.” Her fists clench at her sides.

I crouch down in front of her. “You’re right. Your mother did know Jeb, and was very fond of him. And in some ways she did send him. She really did.”

“Rachel,” he growls behind me.

I reach for her hand. She’s trembling. I force a smile, emotion suddenly tight and overwhelming in my chest. “But sometimes an angel has to face challenges on earth. A test. It’s like in books. And that’s what Jeb is here to do now. If he—if we—pass the tests and get it all right, the
n . . .
”

“Then we live happy ever after?”

The ball of emotion swells so hard and sharp into my throat, I almost choke. I’m sure I’m committing some terrible sin. That I’ll burn in hell, let alone never find any kind of happy ever after.

“Something like that,” I whisper.

Her gaze is riveted to mine. She is searching my eyes for the mistruth, the trick. When she can’t see it, her eyes pool with tears and shimmer.

“It’ll be our secret, okay?” I whisper. “For the meantime.”

Her gaze darts to Jeb. She holds his eyes a moment, too, then she nods. The tears spill over and shine down her cheeks.

“Come,” I say softly, helping her off the sofa and ushering her toward the stairs. “Brandy will be here and loading your bike into her truck any minute. We need to get you geared up before she comes.”

“I don’t want to go to bike camp.”

“Yes, you do. It’ll make you feel better, honest. And I need to go to work, and Jeb needs to go sort some things out.”

As I lead her up the stairs I feel Jeb’s eyes boring hotly into my back.

When I come downstairs, Jeb is pacing like a caged bear.

“Where is she?”

“Brushing her teeth. She’ll be down in a minute.”

“What in hell did you do that for?” he demands. “Going on about proving my innocence? Passing some test on earth? Christ, Rachel.”

“Oh, and what did you want me to say? That the cops are looking for you because they think you raped her birth mother?”

Anger flares through him.

I touch his arm. “Look, we have to hew as close to the truth as we can. It’ll be easier in the long run when it all comes out. She’s not the only kid in this town who’s going to be messed up with this. Today you’re going to publicly accuse four men of perjury, three of whom have children of their own, one of them around the same age as Quinn. You knew this wasn’t going to be easy.”

He turns away.

“Jeb, look at me, I don’t know how to do this, either. We can only feel our way as best we can, guided by our morals, by the worldview we do have.” I hesitate. “Remember? We used to share a worldview. You helped me see things in new ways.”

“And yet,” he says, very quietly, “in your view you believed I was capable of raping two young women. Murdering one of them.”

My eyes flicker and my face goes hot with shame. I drop my hand back to my side.

“It’s because of what happened with my father, wasn’t it?” he says. “That’s really why you thought I was capable. And when you told the court about me and my father, they all believed I could have done this horrific thing.”

Nausea washes up into my chest. “Let’s not do this now—”

He swears viciously. “I should never have told you, you know that.”

“Listen to me, I—”

“You know why I
did
tell you?” His eyes glitter fiercely. “Because I needed absolution, that’s why. Because I could never shake the goddamn guilt. It hounded me every day of my life. I
needed
you to know what happened when I was a kid. I needed someone to understand. I needed forgiveness. From you, Rachel. So I could move forward with you in my own mind. So I could be with you forever with a clean conscience.”

His words rip through me. I let him down all those years ago. I hadn’t realized what he needed from me back then. And then I betrayed him. The weight of this is suddenly staggering.

I hear the water in the bathroom shutting off, Quinn’s footfall on the floor above. She’s coming.

“You need to go,” I say quickly. “You need to be gone before Brandy arrives.”

He holds my gaze in silence for a beat, then spins around and strides for the door, untying the apron as he goes.

“You should stay in the boathouse until the interview,” I call after him.

“Like a felon,” he says, tossing my apron onto a stool. “Hidden in the barn.”

“That’s not nec—”

He raises his palm, reaches for the doorknob.

“Jeb—”

He refuses to look back.

“Do not go anywhere until that interview.
Please.
”

He yanks open the door and slams it shut behind him.

“You can’t afford to let them take you in!” I yell after him, but he’s gone. I don’t know if he’s heard me. And I feel sick.

CHAPTER 14

I swing open the boardroom door and stride in. The group around the conference table glances up sharply. Behind them, picture windows showcase the ski runs and lift lines up Bear Mountain and the snowcapped glaciers beyond. One wall of the room is painted a sage green and displays a row of British Columbian and Canadian newspaper awards, along with a photo of my grandfather holding the first edition of the
Snowy Creek Leader
hot off the press.

“Good morning,” I say, putting a notepad and pen on the table and drawing out a chair. It’s Thursday, 9:02 a.m. I am two minutes late for the weekly editorial meeting. Cass Rousseau, my editor, sits at the head of the table. Her back straightens in surprise as she sees me.

“Rachel?”

I seat myself. “I’m going to sit in on the news meeting this morning.”

A beat of silence, a flicker of exchanged glances around the table. I don’t usually attend the weekly editorial meetings. The news content is essentially Cass’s to manage. I meet with her separately from time to time, but I want them all to see firsthand where I come down on this story unfolding beneath us.

“You heard, then,” Cass says, “about the call I got from Jebbediah Cullen?”

I nod. “Go ahead, Cass. What’ve you got? How’re you going to handle it?”

Another glance, this time exchanged between Cass and her crime reporter, Jonah Tallingsworth. I know what my editor is thinking. She’s fairly new in town, but if she’s done her job since receiving Jeb’s call yesterday morning, she’ll have dug up the sordid details of the old Findlay-Zukanov case. If she didn’t already know, she’d have learned I dated Jeb in school, and that I, along with other prominent members of our community, testified against him. And judging by the defensiveness in her posture, the guardedness in her eyes, Cass is expecting me to quash the story. My editor is ready for a fight on journalistic principle.

Cass moistens her lips. “Cullen’s release from prison is old news. My fresh angle here is, that after his release, he did not retreat into hiding as one might expect a guilty man to do. Instead he’s come straight home to face this community head-on in an attempt to prove his innocence, and he’s naming some of the town’s top citizens to do it—Levi Banrock, Harvey Zink, Clint Rudiger, and, posthumously, Luke LeFleur, which in turn implicates Luke’s mother, who oversaw the original investigation. This by default could also cast a shadow on Deputy Chief Constable Adam LeFleur.” Her gaze holds mine. “And then there’s Trey Somerland, and you, who also testified against him.”

The others watch me. I feel tension in the room. These are big names. Big stakes. And clearly personal for me.

I inhale deeply. “Which is why I’m going to distance myself from the story. I want a Chinese wall of sorts between you and your reporters and me on this, Cass. And I want everything run by legal before it goes to press. It’ll still raise eyebrows, but we’ll have a clear conscience on our end. Otherwise the shots are yours to call.”

Cass raises her brow. The others exchange another glance. I read surprise in their faces.

But I trust Cass’s journalistic expertise. I was lucky to hire her. She was a top city reporter who took a lower-paying job in Snowy Creek because she wanted to raise her kid here as a single mom. Like so many others, she believes in the outdoor lifestyle, the access to wilderness, that this is a safe, friendly town. This story will prove there’s a dark underbelly to every place, no matter what you see on the surface.

I lean forward. “There is only one thing I want out of this story, and that’s the truth. However it plays. Any concerns that arise from the fallout, again, take it straight to our outside legal counsel. I’ll let them know you’re on this story.”

A beat of silence. “This is a big one. The Lower Mainland media is going to pick up on this,” Jonah says. “Especially if we make a public spectacle of it all at the Shady Lady. And because we’re a weekly, the dailies and TV stations will scoop us before we even hit the streets next week.”

“Which is why we take charge. The
Leader
owns this. I want a full multimedia approach on this one, guys. As soon as we’re out of this meeting, a teaser goes up on our website. Breaking news—Cullen requests exclusive interview in highly public venue. Name those names. We link this to our social media streams: Twitter, Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, the works. Try to turn it viral. And I want all the eyeballs to feed back to our website. I want people anticipating the more in-depth feature that will hit the streets when we go to press next week.”

My team doesn’t know yet that I’m working with Jeb, but I plan to distance myself from this point forward, because the minute I walk out of this boardroom, I’m pretty damn sure I’m going to become part of this story in an entirely different way. Trey’s words echo through my mind.

They’re going to look at you as an accessor
y . . .
The cop manning the roadblock saw you there. I saw you ther
e
. . .

I run my gaze over at the faces around the table. “Where’s Hallie?”

“She was on scene shooting the wildfire last night. She’ll be in later. I have her booked for the Cullen interview, though.” Cass scribbles something in her notes.

“Good. One more thing.” I lean forward. “The police are looking at Cullen as a person of interest in the wildfire that started last night. Apparently it looks like arson. It started on his property and police found his bike there.”

Eyes widen.

“How do you know this?” Cass says.

“I was also on scene, and I heard from a personal source this morning. Cas
s . . .
” I pause. “However this plays, go for the gut.”

“You were there with Rescue One?” Cass asks.

“No.”

A seriousness enters Cass’s eyes as she hears the subtext in my words.

“So, we go with however this plays, even if your name comes up in a potentially negative context?” She’s testing me.

“Even so.” I meet the eyes of each member of my editorial team in turn: Blake, Jonah, Peyton—it’s a small team, supplemented by several freelancers and columnists. “Good luck, guys.” I smile. “Jonah’s right, it’s a big one. Let’s go rattle some cages.”

I leave Cass to run the rest of the editorial meeting. But as I make for my office, I feel the gravity of what has been set in motion, and I feel the tendrils of fear. Snowy Creek might look like a Disney ski village that belongs in a holiday snow globe. But like any small town, the fissures beneath its surface can run dirty and deep. And in them a dark and dangerous evil can lurk.

An evil we might just have shaken free.

“Don’t lie to me, dammit!” Lily clutched the T-shirt Adam had worn under his uniform yesterday. Her face was blotchy, red. “Smell it.” She shoved it in his face. “That’s not my perfume. Who is she? How long has this been going on? Over a year now?”

Adam braced his hands on the kitchen counter, head down, and took a deep breath. “I can’t deal with this now.”

“
You
can’t deal with it? What about
me
, the kids? Does the whole community know you’ve been screwing another woman? Does everyone know who she is, apart from me? Do they see me for a complete fool? Are they laughing behind my back?”

He could hear the thickness of tears in her slurred words, the old paranoia resurfacing.

“Smell!” she demanded, shoving the shirt under his face.

He spun, grasped her wrist. His eyes lasered hers. “What I can smell is vodka. It’s ten in the morning, you’re drunk, and I need to get to work.” His heart thudded, perspiration beading on his lip. “Where are the boys?”

“Where were
you
all night?”

“The boys, Lily.” He was angry. So angry. He thought they’d put this behind them.

“Stacey Sedgefield took them with Missy to bike camp.”

“And how are they getting home?”

Her shoulders, her whole body seemed to sag.

“You’re fetching them?” he said.

She pulled out of his grip, looked away in sudden shame.

“How can I trust you with them, when you do this?”

Adam knew that despite her problems, her children, her family, their relationship, were everything to Lily. It was how she defined herself.

“I’ll be fine by then,” she said softy, unable to meet Adam’s eyes.

“When did this start again, the drinking?”

She walked unsteadily into the dining room and reached for the back of a chair, her features crumpling, her puffy eyes watery. “When I smelled her on your clothes again,
I . . .
I didn’t know what to do. I wanted to blot it all out.”

He felt sweat beginning to dampen his uniform under his arms now, his blood pressure peaking. “Are you still taking your pills? You shouldn’t drink with the antidepressants.”

She stared blankly at her open laptop on the table.

“You stopped the pills?”

“They made me feel dead.”

Adam shoved his fingers into his hair. He didn’t know how to handle this. He was sandwiched between his mother and her early onset dementia on one hand, and his depressive, paranoiac wife on the other. His mother had started going downhill after Luke was killed in action. Lily, meanwhile, had had a rough ride ever since their youngest, Mikey, was born, starting with a bad spate of postpartum blues that had turned clinically serious. Physical stuff Adam could handle. He could wrestle things into place with his muscles, with sheer brute force. But the fragile mechanisms of the human psyche, a woman’s mind in particular, this was something arcane to him. Prior to Lily’s diagnosis, Adam had believed depression was self-indulgent, something you needed to snap out of. Then she’d started to self-medicate, and a vicious circle began as she alternated between drunkenness and then increasing paranoia during her hangover periods. And all the while she battled to keep up the facade of a good mother and the perfect wife of a top cop. She’d cracked under the weight of it in the end. He’d been forced to see that she needed intervention, medical help. After treatment she’d seemed better. He’d thought it was finally all behind them. Now this.

So much for giving up the career of his dreams and moving to Snowy Creek for his family. Things had gone to shit anyway, no matter how he grappled to hold it all together.

“You need to go back to Dr. Bennett,” he said, gently. “I want you to go see him today, okay? Will you do that for me? Will you call me at work when you’ve made the appointment?”

She drew in a shuddering breath and her body heaved with a dry sob. She gripped the back of the dining room chair tightly.

“Do it for us. For the boys,” he said. “You cannot start drinking again. You need to go back on the medication. We can do this. We can hold it all together.”

She swallowed. And they stood there, the kitchen clock ticking, loud.

“Please tell me where you were last night, before the fire?” Her voice came out so small. Pleading. He had a sudden glimpse of the young Lily, the woman he’d fallen in love with. Always vulnerable, sensitive. Creative. She’d made him feel so male, so strong, so capable of protecting her. It had been a seductive feeling, one that had appealed to the macho guardian in Adam. The cop.

“I had some admin work to catch up on, then the wildfire broke out,” he said. “All agencies responded. And I need to get back to the office now. You need to call Dr. Bennett.”

“The
Leader
web page says the fire started sometime between one a.m. and two a.m.” She nodded to the open laptop. Adam noticed then that she had the
Snowy Creek Leader
’s breaking news page pulled up. “Where were you before the fire? You couldn’t have been in the station the whole time.”

“Hey.” He went up to her, cupped her face. “Please, don’t worry. And yes, I was at the station. There’s a lot going on right no
w . . .
it’s a bad time.”

Her eyes flickered back to her laptop.

“You mean with Jeb Cullen being back.”

Adam went stock-still. “What?”

“It’s breaking news. It’s all over Facebook and Twitter. He’s giving an exclusive interview at the Shady Lady Saloon at five today. He claims he’s come to prove his innocence, to find out who really killed Merilee, and where her body is.”

Adam lunged for the laptop, spun the screen to face him properly. He quickly scanned the piece. A sharp ringing started in his brain. Cullen was claiming that Luke, his deceased brother, was among those who perjured themselves at the trial. His mouth went dry and he swore. He was going to have a small-town insurrection on his hands come five
o
’
clock—a shitstorm.

“I need to get to work. Now.”

He started to move, but she placed her hand on his arm. “How’d you get that bruise on your knuckles?”

His gaze ticked to his hand.

She reached up and gently fingered his cheekbone. “And this cut here?”

“The fire,” he said quickly. “I was helping carry some equipment and got a branch across my face. Make that appointment. Call me when you’ve done it.” He moved quickly to the bedroom, opened the gun safe, inserted his sidearm into his holster, and donned his bulletproof vest. In the mudroom he found his uniform cap, jacket.