What should he do? Call the police?
But how would he explain what he’d found? It wasn’t as if he’d simply stumbled across it — he’d had to cross the river, climb the bank, then pull the cairn apart stone by stone.
He stood up, still uncertain. Then, from across the river, he heard Kevin calling him. “Dad! Hey, Dad!”
The boy was still close to the bank, but he was wading into the stream. “Don’t!” Glen yelled. “Stay there!”
Kevin kept coming, wading deeper into the swiftly moving water. “What is it? What did you find?” he called.
Even on Glen the water had come up almost to his waist. On Kevin it would be nearly neck deep. “Don’t come any farther!” Glen yelled. “It isn’t anything! Just a bunch of rocks!” Looking down at the skeleton again, he hesitated for just one more moment, then kicked enough of the stones over it so that it was no longer visible. “Just stay there,” he called to Kevin once more. “I’m on my way back.” Moving quickly, he scrambled back down the bank, crossed the beach and started back across the river. When he came back to the bank where Kevin was now waiting for him, he opened the creel to show him the fish he’d caught. “What do you say?” he asked. “Shall we have it for lunch?”
Kevin eyed the fish warily. “Can’t we just have a hamburger?” he asked.
Glen’s eyes shifted back to the stone cairn on the other side of the river, and suddenly he wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t look familiar, that didn’t make strange things happen in his mind. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Let’s go.”
But as they started back toward the car, Glen felt the strange fog closing around him once more, and heard the voice whispering to him yet again.
An experiment, it said. It will only be an experiment. Use the knife.…
CHAPTER 61
“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Anne muttered, gazing dejectedly at the plate of uneaten food on the table. Beyond the window, water was cascading over Snoqualmie Falls, but even that magnificent vista had done nothing to lift her spirits.
“You still have to eat,” Mark Blakemoor had told her when he’d suggested they meet here for lunch. “I know you’re upset, and I’m not about to say you shouldn’t be. But you have to eat, and so do I, and we might as well talk over lunch.”
So she’d followed him up the road from the campground to the falls, but so far she’d eaten nothing. Now she gave up entirely on the idea of eating and pushed the plate away. “Edna Kraven,” she sighed. An image of the heavy woman with her shoe-polish hair and the clothes that never quite suited her, came into Anne’s mind, and with it a discomforting recollection of the woman’s hostility as she consistently refused in interview after interview to concede that her eldest son could have been a serial killer. Edna, right up until the end, had maintained her faith in Richard Kraven’s perfection, just as she had maintained the utter contempt she had never failed to display toward her younger son.
Even now, as Anne sat in the dining room of the Salish Lodge with Mark Blakemoor, she remembered Edna’s scornful clucking when she’d been told that Rory Kraven had killed both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. “Well, that’s just ridiculous! Rory couldn’t even talk to a woman, let alone kill one. Now, my Richard — there was a ladies’ man. Of course no one could take the place of his mother. But Rory? Don’t make me laugh — I was his mother, but I believe in being honest. And Rory just wasn’t much of anything. Why, either one of those women could have just barked at Rory, and he’d have run the other way!”
There’d been more — a lot more — but Anne had tuned it out, not simply because she’d heard most of it before, but because she’d tired years ago of listening to Edna Kraven’s version of reality. Anne believed firmly that most, if not all, of Edna’s sons’ problems could be traced directly to their mother, and had she not known better, both of Edna’s sons would have headed her own list of suspects in the woman’s murder. But with both sons already dead … “My God,” she breathed, an idea blooming in her mind. “Mark, what if she knew? What if she knew who killed Rory?”
“Well, I think we can presume she did at the end,” the detective observed.
Anne glared at him. “That’s sick.”
“Cop humor,” Blakemoor replied. “It’s always sick — goes with the job.” Now he, too, pushed his unfinished meal aside. For the last hour he’d been trying to analyze the feelings he’d had when he’d first read the note that arrived in Anne Jeffers’s mail that day. He should have been able to take it in stride, to look at it with the detachment of his years of experience with the Homicide Division.
He should have been able to look at it simply as one more scrap of evidence, one piece of the jigsaw puzzle.
Instead, it enraged him. He wanted to grab hold of the creep who’d written it, slam him up against the nearest wall and beat the holy shit out of him.
So much for objectivity, he’d thought wryly as he struggled to keep his rage from showing while he studied the note far longer than he really needed to. For the rest of the morning its ramifications had preyed on him, and now he was worried in a way that went far beyond mere professional concern for a possible victim. Still, when he spoke again, he did his best to keep at least a semblance of a professional patina on his voice. “Look, Anne, have you got someplace you can take your kids until this is all over?”
Anne deliberately shifted her eyes away from him, as if the view beyond the window had finally caught her attention. She’d been thinking about exactly the same thing herself. In fact, she’d already made up her mind that tonight she and Glen would discuss the possibility of temporarily moving out of the house. Mark Blakemoor, though, hadn’t made any mention of Glen at all. And she was pretty sure she knew why. Deciding she had to face the issue squarely, she fixed her eyes on his. “Me and the kids,” she repeated, her voice flat. “What about Glen?”
Now it was the detective’s gaze that wavered, but only for a moment. “What about him?” he asked.
“I believe I asked you first,” Anne said, her voice hardening perceptibly. “I didn’t miss your implication the other day that he might have killed Heather’s cat. Are you now suggesting that he killed Rory Kraven? And Edna?” At least he has the good grace to blush, Anne thought as her words brought a bright flush to the detective’s face.
“I don’t know what I think,” Mark replied. “There’s no way I can rule your husband out of what happened to the cat, and you’re a good enough reporter that you can’t deny that. Not honestly, anyway.” Now it was Anne’s turn to redden, and Mark had to steel himself against the instinct to apologize for his words. But the fact was, no matter how he felt about her, he still had to tell her exactly what he thought. “As for the other stuff, no, I can’t say he did it. And I won’t say he did it.”
As he saw mollification settle over Anne, he was tempted to leave well enough alone, but once more his job wouldn’t let him. “On the other hand, neither one of us can prove he didn’t do any of it, or all of it.” Anne’s eyes darkened and her jaw set angrily, but Blakemoor pushed doggedly on. “Let’s assume he’s not your husband, okay? Just for the sake of argument. So, we’ve got a man whose whole personality has changed in the last few weeks.” He held up a hand to preclude Anne’s interrupting him. “Don’t argue that one — you’re the one who told me. And you also told me he had Kevin bring your whole Kraven file down to him in the hospital. And if you really want to get down and dirty, try this one on for size — let’s just build a scenario, all right? Let’s just say that since he’s been home, he and Cottrell got a little extra cozy, okay? And don’t go all uptight on me — you know this kind of thing goes on all the time. So maybe he and Cottrell have a thing going, and maybe he’s awake the night she gets whacked. Maybe he’s even thinking of dropping over there.”