Читать книгу When the Flood Falls - J.E. Barnard - Страница 4

The glass wall gazed blank-eyed over the clearing, each of its nine panes backed by thick, pale drapes. No woodcutter’s shack here, but a huge, glossy house built of stripped and varnished logs, each as wide as Lacey’s waist. The porch pillars were sanded tree trunks and in the arched front door was carved a relief of saplings. More show home than family home, more Neil’s flavour than Dee’s. Why had Dee kept it in the divorce?

Spruces ringed the glade, their roots lost in tangled undergrowth, while before the house, all was austere. Red rock shards filled zigzag beds punctuated by spiky shrubs, their jagged edges scraping on Lacey as she gave the doorbell a final push. Dee had coaxed her for weeks, leaning on the good old university days and shared misadventures in her daily texts and voice mails, to set up this reunion supper, and now she, not Lacey, was late. Six years of separation due to careers and spouses was supposed to finally end, but Dee wasn’t home.

As the last echo of the last chime died, Lacey retreated from the stone-paved patio to her shabby Civic to lean on the fender and contemplate her options. They amounted to two: leave now, or wait until Dee either showed up or replied to her messages.

Five minutes. She would give Dee that much. She glanced at her watch to mark the time, crossed her arms, and settled into the alert idleness learned through years of conducting stakeouts on the Force. Catalogue every detail. That was how you knew when something had changed. The flutter of a drape might indicate someone hiding inside, or that a rear window had been opened for a stealthy escape, sending a draft through the rooms. A barely registered movement beyond a hedge could signify someone sneaking out, or in. A man in a mail uniform wasn’t always delivering letters and flyers. Not that these scattered acreages along the hillside would have home delivery. On the edge of wilderness, an hour from Calgary, at the feet of the Rocky Mountains, a mailman would stick out like a neon Popsicle on an igloo.

As she leaned there in the still glade, the forest rustled toward her from all sides. Tiny sounds — leaves or birds or little rodent feet going their secret ways through last year’s leaves — whispered isolation. She might be alone on the hillside, save for the sharp corner of a roofline higher up. She should be on her way back to Calgary and supper, although it would mean crossing that lone bridge over the rushing brown river again.

Locals expected the last of the snowpack to surge through sometime next week. Until then the river would keep rising, bringing down whole trees and threatening the bridge. Blinding, turbulent water, Lacey’s worst nightmare, and right under the windows of her new jobsite, the not-quite-finished Bragg Creek Arts Centre and Foothills History Museum. Lacey knew even less about art and history than she did about security-camera wiring, but being Wayne’s gopher brought in some pay and kept her most desperate worries at bay, at least during working hours. She couldn’t ask more than that of her new life. Not yet. Was that shushing sound the river tumbling over its banks, or just the breeze through the spruce tops? Where was Dee?

Only three minutes had passed. The emptiness was getting to her. Too much open space after a decade in the overpopulated Lower Mainland, where even the wilderness trails were rarely empty. It was a two-minute drive down the hill into Bragg Creek. She could grab a burger at the bar, the only eatery that wouldn’t look askance at her dusty jeans, workboots, and faded T-shirt. Okay, two more minutes and then she was going. She scanned the front of the house again.

Still, no drapes fluttered, but this time she recognized something odd she’d overlooked in her annoyance. Dee loved the sun and the wide-open sky, fir trees piercing the blue, birds fluttering past her windows. Loved to watch deer wander through the yard to nibble on anything she planted. She had gushed about all that to Lacey when she’d first moved out here, six, maybe seven years ago. That explained the spiky shrubs, anyway. Not deer food. Why, now, were all the windows shrouded in heavy drapes on a celestially sunny day, when small birds were squabbling around a seed tray suspended from the porch overhang? All these Dee loved, and yet she had blocked them out.

Lacey straightened up, surveying the house with the keen ex-cop’s eyes she hadn’t fully brought to bear earlier. No visible windows were open, but that could mean air conditioning. No drapes had been disturbed since her last scan. If the back of the house wasn’t as closed in, maybe Dee was merely protecting expensive upholstery from sun damage. Circling the house would fill in the two minutes nicely. A single glance inside could ease the half-formed worry that her old friend might be lying injured inside, victim of an accident or worse. Times beyond count as a constable, she had undertaken welfare checks on strangers, saved a few, and found some past saving. She could not let this one pass her by.

Returning to the carved front door, she turned left past the vast windows and around a massive fieldstone chimney stack. Each window she saw was securely locked and swathed. French doors on the rear terrace had their blinds turned down too tight to see anything at all between the slats. Impossible to guess which rooms lay beyond which windows. She’d seen grow ops less carefully cloistered.

A plank deck connected the terrace and the front patio to a triple-car garage. A high post-and-beam pergola supported a riot of blossoms in hanging baskets well above the reach of a deer’s teeth. Garage doors: all locked. No sign of forced entry anywhere, no signals of distress. Just an unfriendly house devoid of its current resident.

She skirted the sage-green deck furniture and looked again over the rear yard. The spruce circle was wider here, leaving space for a tended lawn and opening a gap where a woodland path ran up to a wider trail. A wire-fenced dog run attached to the garage was deserted, but the stainless steel water bowl was half full. Maybe Dee had simply taken a dog for a walk. She’d always had a dog. Young Duke, a honey-haired Labrador, had hiked the Algonquin Trail with them when he was a gambolling pup, barely knee high. He’d be old now, and slow. Maybe it was a slow walk, and this search and speculation were only the old habits of a cop’s brain that had not quite retired six weeks ago, when Lacey’s resignation letter landed on her staff sergeant’s desk. The RCMP had been her life for most of a decade, and now it wasn’t. Her head needed time to adjust to civilian life, to stop seeing criminals behind every closed curtain. Dee had simply gone for a walk and lost track of time.

Blue sky reflected on glass in the garage’s rear wall: a window inside the dog run, above Lacey’s head. Impossible to tell from here whether it was covered or not, but she bet not. Dee’s vehicle was probably parked in there right now, supporting the walk theory. Finding out would fill in another minute or two. She jiggered an oblong patio table, one end at a time, down the wide plank steps and into the dog run. When it was firmly in position against the garage wall, she scrambled up and peered in. What would Dee think if she came home to find her old friend perched on a patio table, peeking into her garage?

Whatever Lacey had subconsciously hoped or feared, the garage held no answers. A second small window high up in the end wall cast enough light to show her a gold Lexus SUV and a rack holding two bright plastic kayaks. The third space was empty now of whatever Dee’s recently divorced skunk had driven. Did that SUV mean she had gone for a walk, or did she have a second vehicle that she now parked in Neil’s spot? Had she gone away with someone else? Why wasn’t she calling back or replying to texts?

As Lacey turned back to the house, to the deep shade of the front patio, she blinked. Just for a second, she had flashed back to coming home to her old house in Langley, checking that all the drapes were shut tight the way she had left them, and scanning the street for Dan’s car before she risked opening the door. She knew all too well what she’d been afraid of then. Was Dee afraid of her ex-husband, too? In the warm afternoon sunshine, Lacey shivered.

Half a mile away, in a wide vale, Dee Phillips crouched on the trail beside a gravel road, balancing with the help of a gnarled walking stick. Her ankle stung with the strain, an inescapable reminder she had pushed herself too far, too hard, too soon. But this was her first time here on foot since the accident. Her first time sitting alone with the memory of Duke. Six months ago today, almost to the hour. “I’m so sorry, old friend,” she murmured to the wind-tossed grasses. “I should have left you home that night. You couldn’t keep up.” There was no answering whimper, no sense of that whitened muzzle pushing into her hand. No presence here at all. Here, if anywhere, his spirit should have lingered, waiting for her to come back. He was gone, truly and completely.

She was groping in her jeans pockets for a tissue when the rumble of a truck engine approached. Scrambling to her feet, she whistled. The auburn plumes of two setter’s tails bobbed up among the Saskatoon berry bushes at the edge of the trees. Bright muzzles turned toward her. “Beau, stand,” she yelled, panic lending her voice power. “Boney, stand.”

The truck rumbled closer. The dogs stood, poised and graceful, waiting for the next order. She kept her hand up to reinforce this one. Please don’t let them break now. Not here. She risked taking her eyes off them and looked over her shoulder for the vehicle. It came in a dust cloud, an old red Ford more rust than paint, and slowed to a crawl as it neared the trail crossing. Just Eddie Beal on his way home from picketing the museum. He leaned out the open window.

“All right there?”

“Yes, thanks.”

“You mind them young dogs, now. Hockey jocks are back at the Wyman place.”

Was that thrice-accursed Jarrad among them? There was no point asking Eddie. He could name every dog for miles around, but his egg customers were the only humans whose names he cared to remember. Well, and hers, though only since the museum had begun construction. If she let him get one more sentence out, he’d be on her about that again. She backed up a step, stifling a grimace as the weight on her ankle shifted. “I’d better get them home,” she said. “No sense taking chances.”

He waved and drove on, with no sign he’d noticed her tear-streaked cheeks. Although with Eddie, you could never tell. He was an odd man any way you sliced him. She called Boney and Beau, lavished praise when they came bounding up, and was groping in her pocket for treats when her cellphone dinged. Clutching the walking stick in the crook of her elbow, she swiped the screen. Supper Lacey, read the reminder. Along with three missed calls, one voice mail, two texts. It couldn’t be coming up to five thirty already.

Apparently it was. She had ignored the first reminder half an hour ago, sure she would get back to the house in time to tidy herself before Lacey arrived. She’d used to run the whole hillside trail in less time. Today, too strung up to remember her ankle brace, she had been hobbling by the halfway mark. A stubborn commitment to this pilgrimage had forced her onward. She looked up at the hill path and groaned. The longer, gentler way would take her the full half hour back, every step more agonizing than the last. The short way ended right across from her backyard, but the first bit was a steep uphill and needed two good hands and two strong, flexible feet. Why hadn’t she asked Eddie for a lift? If Lacey knew she was on her way, she’d surely wait. Maybe. Lacey hadn’t been eager to meet up at all. It had taken weeks of loosely disguised begging to get her here, and she might not wait for the reason behind it if she thought Dee had simply overlooked their supper date.

If she wouldn’t help …

Dee pushed that thought aside. Lacey would help. It was in her bones. But explaining these months of terror over the phone, especially when it might not be real, might be a by-product of the pain pills and nightmares … that was something Dee couldn’t face. Lacey just had to stay around long enough to listen. Hitting redial on the last call from McCrae, L., Dee held her breath.

The phone’s vibration caught Lacey with the patio table halfway up the steps. She braced it against her legs to answer. Dee’s number. At last. Relief gave way to a swell of anger and a sharper voice than she intended. “So, you remembered.”

“I’m so sorry. I did remember. I even have pineapple chicken in the oven. Are you still near my house? The thing is, well, I can’t get back.”

“You’re blowing me off even though you already started supper?”

“No! I mean, I really can’t get back. I took the dogs for a walk, and I guess I never told you I broke my ankle. It’s not fully healed and I walked too far, and now I just can’t make it home on foot. I’m less than a kilometre away by the trail, but almost five by the road. I hate to beg a favour if you’ve hung around waiting already, but can you please come and get me?”

Ten minutes later, Lacey was creeping along a back road that, according to Dee’s directions, would take her around the hill. She’d have to let the dogs into the back seat. Drool and paw prints and that smell that would cling to the cheap upholstery for weeks, almost as bad as cigarette smoke. But this was what you did for old friends. The Civic bobbled over washboard gravel and once shivered as its undercarriage grazed a high spot. Didn’t Alberta believe in paving its roads? Or at least grading them. No wonder people out here drove pickups and SUVs.

Finally, here was the white-painted rail fence Dee had mentioned. Lacey signalled and turned. This bit of gravel was marginally smoother, running parallel to the hill’s steep, treed backside. In the other direction, up a gentle rise, half a dozen opulent log homes sprawled in their own clearings, the westerly sun slanting off their many windows.

So the land wasn’t quite as deserted as it had seemed. Good to know. Or bad, she supposed, if you were an environmentalist concerned with protecting wilderness from development. Dee would be two kilometres along, at the crossing of a marked trail. Watch for horseback riders, the sign would say.

She spotted the sign, but couldn’t see Dee. A slash of red proved to be an Irish setter poised motionless at the road’s edge. Behind him, another sat by a dusty stump that struggled to its feet and became Dee, leaning hard on what looked like a tree branch. As Lacey stopped the car, the closest dog lifted its lip in warning. The other moved in front of Dee. No RCMP canine-handling course was needed to read their protective instinct. Rather than trigger further aggression by approaching on foot, Lacey waited in the car while her old friend hobbled forward.

“So what happened?” Lacey asked, once the dogs were stowed in the back — so close she could feel their hot breath on her neck — and Dee had eased herself into the passenger seat.

“I was stupid,” said Dee, fumbling with her seatbelt. “I wanted to come be with Duke where he was hit by a car last winter. Physio’s been going well so I thought I could walk this far. Didn’t think about the rough ground or the slopes. My ankle’s the size of a grapefruit already.”

“Put it up on the dash to ease the swelling.” Lacey took her foot from the brake and set off slowly to avoid jolting Dee’s foot. Duke was dead, then. Getting hit by a car was often a faster, kinder death than many old dogs could expect, but hard on their owners. “How’d you break your ankle?”

“Jumping into the ditch with these two lads. Duke wasn’t fast enough. This road’s usually deserted after the last commuters get home from Calgary, but that night a car blasted out of a side road, fishtailed on the gravel, and would have creamed us all if we hadn’t dived over the snowbank. And there went my ankle. Bone, tendons, and all. I yelled at the stupid car but it was long gone. Didn’t stop or even look back. When I crawled up to the road, Duke was lying there with a shattered hip.”

“Did they catch the driver?”

“Eventually.” Dee closed her eyes. “I couldn’t help much. Too stunned to even notice the colour or make. I was more worried about freezing to death. I’d fallen on my phone and it was toast. I couldn’t stand up, couldn’t do anything except cover Duke with my jacket and hope someone would come along soon.” She sniffed. “Soon is relative in those conditions.”

“But somebody eventually came?” Lacey turned onto the washboard road and slowed to make the Civic jiggle as gently as possible over the corrugations. She’d had enough injuries herself to remember the pain of jiggling.

Dee winced. “Yeah, somebody came, and just in time. In normal January temperatures, wearing jogging gear, I’d have been hypothermic in minutes. But a chinook blew through the night before, brought the temperature up thirty degrees by morning, and it was still near zero at dusk. Boney and Beau huddled up with me and that helped. Ironic, though: I’d been on top of the world four hours earlier, shaken hands on a huge East Village development deal after lunch, and was freezing to death by suppertime, with a useless phone and my dog dying at my feet.” She let out a sour laugh. “From development tycoon to Darwin Award candidate in half a day. I was damned close to falling into a frozen sleep when rescue finally arrived. The devil on horseback, as they say.”

“The devil being your ex-husband?”

“Neil? No chance. He never comes out here anymore. At least …” Dee hesitated. “I don’t think he does. He slimes around my office occasionally, trying to winkle deal tips out of my staff, but not when I’m there. This was one of my uphill neighbours, Jake Wyman. He was literally on horseback, out riding, and on the road only because he thought the hill trail would be too slippery for the horse in the dark. I’d hardly seen him since I handled some property for his ex-wife, and he might have been holding a grudge. Although I’m sure he would have helped, anyway. You don’t pass by on the other side out here, especially in winter. People would die.” She sighed, with gratitude or maybe resignation.

“I owe him a lot. He wrapped me in his heavy jacket and then called his groom to get the horse, a blanket and transport for me, and a mug of hot tea, plus a vehicle to take Duke to the emergency animal hospital. While our other neighbour drove me to Calgary to get my foot X-rayed, Jake took Boney and Beau home for me. He didn’t mention his ex during all that, although when he came to get me from the hospital the next day he asked if I’d give him her current address. He’s not one to miss a chance.”

A wife who didn’t want to be found by her ex-husband was a smart wife, in Lacey’s book. A woman was at highest risk of being killed by an ex-partner in the year immediately following separation. One reason she was a province away from Dan. Not that she thought he would come after her, but then she’d have said he would never raise his voice, much less his fist. After that first time, who knew what he was capable of? She swung the car onto the paved road, ignoring a back-seat growl and the prospect of herding these hostile setters into their pen for the night. “Did you give this Jake the information he wanted — out of gratitude, maybe?”

“Of course not. Any lawyer would know better. I suggested he write to her in care of me and he said he would think about it. He never brought it up again. His chef brought me meals every day for the whole next week, which was a godsend because I was woozy with pain pills and grief, barely able to stand. Jake came every day, too, checked if I needed anything, and took Boney and Beau out running with his horse. He still does. They love it, and I sure can’t take them running right now.”

“And the reckless driver?” As she signalled for the turn up to Dee’s road, Lacey realized she’d been driving beside the churning river and had not let it get to her. So that part of her cop’s focus hadn’t deserted her. Information gathering ahead of emotion. Always. “How did the police get him?”

“Tip from a neighbour, and he surrendered himself a couple of weeks later. Too late to tell if he’d been drinking, but the hockey players around here party hard during the midseason break. They’re mostly rising NHL stars with too much money and fame and not much responsibility, except to their team. Anyway, he’s going to court next month.”

“On what charges?”

“A bunch,” said Dee. “Reckless endangerment, I think, and something like careless use of a vehicle. I’m a real estate lawyer; driving offences aren’t my strong suit. Nothing for killing my dog, though. He didn’t hit me, and a dog’s life doesn’t count in the police’s eyes. But I’ll get to make a statement, and I won’t hold back on what his actions did to my life. That’s my driveway coming up.”

The dogs, to Lacey’s relief, went directly to their pen and took turns gulping the water left for them. She closed their gate, helped Dee up to the deck and around to a side door, then finally got her first look inside the vast varnished house. Mudroom first, cluttered like all of them with boots, coats, shelves stacked with miscellany. The kitchen beyond it was all varnished wood, black granite countertops, black appliances. That was her first impression, quickly displaced by the enticing aroma of baking pineapple. “Mmm.”

Dee hobbled to a stool. “Should be almost ready. I didn’t mean for you to make supper, but if I just sit here and give orders, can you finish the meal prep?”

“Sure. You do remember I can’t really cook, right?”

Dee laughed, just a small one, and some of the tension left Lacey’s chest. With Neil out of the picture, the Dee she knew might yet emerge from the shell of perfection that had seemed impenetrable on their last visit. Her earlier reluctance to see Dee seemed silly now. She’d expected to come here, hat metaphorically in hand, with her police career and her marriage in tatters behind her, grovelling for house-hunting contacts from a woman notorious for having her own life together. Not that she was revelling in Dee’s misfortunes, but they were a timely reminder that rain fell onto even the most organized lives. Friends got out the umbrella for each other. Today she was holding the umbrella, even though it meant dog drool in her car and exercising her culinary cluelessness. “What do I do first?”

Half an hour later, the pasta was drained and Dee was tossing the salad. She was still propped up on her stool and alternating between ice wraps and warmth for her ankle.

The dogs barked steadily at Lacey from the moment she stepped outside, growled while she poured their kibble over the fence into their bowls, and only stopped barking at her back once she was inside the house with the door shut. No welcome there. “I gave you a ride home, you ungrateful mutts,” she muttered, but not loud enough for Dee to hear.

After that, she descended into the basement to bring up bottles of wine that would go well with the pineapple chicken. “Not that I can tell one vintage from another, anyway,” Dee confided. “The one we’re having tonight has fruity elements that I figure won’t be horrible with chicken or pineapple, and that’s the extent of my wine lore.”

The basement and as much of the main floor as Lacey glimpsed through archways off the kitchen were more homey than the house’s facade. The furniture was comfortable, if expensive, its neutral hues livened up with textured throw pillows and blankets. The rooms were dim, though sunlight haloed every curtained window.

“Do you mind if I open some drapes?” she asked after setting down three bottles of white. “It’s a lovely evening and I don’t get to be outside much, between work and the commute from Calgary.”

Dee flipped over a few bits of leafy greens before answering. “Uh, sure. Just remember to close them tight before you go. I can’t be hobbling after you.”

“Seems like you wouldn’t need drapes much out here.” Lacey slid back the kitchen curtains. “No neighbours close enough to peer in.” After a moment with no reply from Dee, she went on. “I was careful about my window coverings in Langley, never more so than when Dan first moved out. He wasn’t handling things well, and I was always conscious that he might be outside somewhere, watching my movements.” She let her voice betray some of the fear that lingered from those dark winter weeks. Let Dee know that it was okay to be afraid of her ex, if that’s what she was afraid of, and that the fear was nothing to be ashamed of.

But Dee didn’t rise to that bait. “I always said he wasn’t good enough for you. Are you pouring that wine or not?”

The pouring went on well after the meal had ended. In the vast living room, before they settled onto soft couches amid the colourful cushions and throws, Lacey again opened the drapes, partly to watch the spectacular view of distant mountains and partly to see how Dee would cope. She resolutely ignored the ribbon of turbulent brown water winding through the valley and thought that as long as she couldn’t see the bridge from here, she might be able to ignore the risk that it would be closed by morning. She sank into softness as Dee brought out a photo album of their hike through the Algonquin Trail with puppy Duke. They toasted him and reminisced until the second bottle was done and spruce shadows came creeping across the terrace. The sun was going down, the forest closing in.

Dee limped over and closed the nine sets of drapes with their power cords, then stood fussing with all the edges she could reach to make sure nobody could peer in through a gap. She said, half into the curtains, “You’re likely not in a shape to drive, even if you are an RCMP-trained expert with thousands of patrol kilometres a year. Stay here tonight. I’ve got extra toothbrushes and stuff upstairs, and your choice of spare bedrooms. And your commute to work will be really short in the morning. Hell, stay all week and be my legs. I might need a lot more wine brought up to get me through this last crush before the museum officially opens. If I’d known how stressful being the president of the museum’s building committee was going to turn out, I’d have evaded the honour. Will it all be ready before the gala on Friday, do you think?”

“The security stuff will be,” said Lacey, setting aside for the moment her leap of joy at being offered any bed that wasn’t her old patrol buddy Tom’s much older rec-room couch. Between three weeks of crash space and him lining her up with AWL Security Services for the museum job, the favours were adding up fast. “Wayne is driving himself and me hard to get every metre of cabling in and every uplink tested, inside and out. I can’t speak for anyone else’s job.” Dee, she noted, was still standing, her hand clutching the edge of the last curtain. She didn’t want to be here alone tonight. Would she say why if asked outright? “I shouldn’t drive tonight, you’re right. Can I take you up on the bed and the toothbrush? If you make the offer of a longer stay tomorrow, when we’re both stone sober and wide awake, I promise to give it due consideration.”

“Spoken like the cautious old McCrae of our university days,” said Dee, taking her hand down from the drapery. “How could you have faced that dangerous job year after year when your personal life is more carefully calculated than an insurance actuary’s?”

Soon Lacey was settling into a luxurious upstairs bedroom with magazine-quality décor. Dee’s master suite, from which she had retrieved pajamas and other sleepover necessities, was twice the size and even more lavishly appointed. Its occupant, though, was not much different from the old Dee, who still walked her dogs with messy hair and no makeup, who teased and laughed and reminisced. She would not care if her old friend didn’t arrange the matching throw pillows quite as artfully on the bed in the morning.

Despite the relaxation brought on by the wine and the soft cuddling of the pillow-top mattress, Lacey had a hard time dozing off. The stresses she’d held at bay all evening were niggling again: her lack of a home, her uncertain post-RCMP job and future, Dan dragging his feet on both the divorce and selling their house in Langley, and yes, whatever had Dee so frightened she wouldn’t leave a drape open day or night. The nighttime sounds of the surrounding forest, so soothing by day, whispered ominously by night of beasts on the prowl and hinted at the wildness in the hearts of the trees. Trees like in the fairy tales, whispering, surrounding human habitations, cutting them off with impenetrable hedges and …

At some point along the restless path to full sleep, when the trees were stooping over her bed, clutching at her shoulders, she roused to find Dee bending over the bed, shaking her shoulder and whispering urgently. “Lacey, wake up, please. Please wake up. There’s someone on the deck and the dogs aren’t barking. Please!”