Rubicon Ranch: Riley's Story

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  The morgue attendant recognized Jeff. Jeff swallowed his embarrassment. The county morgue isn’t exactly the place you want everyone to know your name.

  “Mr. Peterson, what can I do for you?” The man eyed Jeff’s sling. He may have known a mourning father on sight but Jeff had to read his nametag to remember even a simple name like Christopher.

  “The, um, sheriff said—Sheriff Bryan—he said there’s a new body. Um, he wanted me to take a look at it. See if I knew the man.”

  Christopher tilted his head, his red hair shifting down across his forehead. “I didn’t get a call about anything like that.”

  “I just bumped into him on the street. Outside. When I was running errands.” Jeff’s arm ached. He wished he’d taken a Vicodin before he started trying to pass his lies. “He told me to stay quiet about it. That it wasn’t common knowledge yet. He just thought,y’know . . .”

  Christopher stayed firm in his seat. “I’ll call in and check with him.” He reached for the phone on his desk.

  “He’s out. I told you. It’ll take forever. Don’t make me come back here again. Please.” Jeff hoped the desperation and panic swirling on his face looked to Christopher like the deep welling pain of a father who’d just lost a child. He hoped even a morgue attendant wasn’t immune to sympathy.

  “Okay. Sorry. It’s just highly unorthodox.”

  “I know. Just following orders, though. Both of us, I guess.”

  Christopher smiled like the director at a funeral home. Practiced understanding. One of those times when a look said more than words.

  The smells of the steel and white tile room brought back sense memories of identifying Riley’s body. He shuffle-stepped past the locker where she had been, and presumably still was. Christopher made no mention of it or gesture toward the refrigerator door.

  He slid open a drawer on the bottom row and lifted a white sheet to expose a man’s face. Middle-aged. Weather-worn.

  A hint of recognition, then a flood.

  It was a face that haunted Jeff’s dreams for nine years now, the landmarks of which he saw every day in Riley’s face. The tired lines of stress added years to the man but the photos Jeff had seen, had committed to memory, were all after the man suffered such trauma. They matched what he saw before him.

  He stared into the face of the man who he stole from, the man whose soul and body Jeff had taken a part of and called it his own. He looked down at the dead face of Riley’s real father.

  Kourtney looked out the sliding glass door to the pool. Riley’s beach ball and snorkel set were still in the basket of water toys by the back shed. She let her eyes trace over them once, and then avoided looking in that direction. She looked instead at the undisturbed surface of the water, smooth as glass. She was going to sit by the pool and read because that’s what normal people did on a hot day. The funeral was still two days away and there was no one to call. Riley would be cremated and the small box containing her ashes would be buried in the cemetery under a small stone. She and Jeff would put flowers in a vase on the small cement base supporting the headstone every Memorial Day and on Riley’s birthday. They would cry a little and then they would come back home and go about their business.

  Jeff didn’t know about the cremation yet. Kourtney knew what he wanted—an open casket in the front of the church altar where people would ogle and cry, the keening of one feeding the keening of another until the whole sanctuary was nothing but a room of howls.

  It was easier to look at a nice wooden box beside a picture of Riley and be done with it. And Kourtney was done with it. It was time to get back to normal. A new normal. One without the daughter who didn’t like her anyway. 

  Jeff made more noise than usual when he came in. His arm was in a sling. When she saw him, Kourtney had a flash of something that may have been guilt, but if she were honest with herself, it was probably disappointment that he hadn’t been more seriously injured when he fell. 

  “Broken?” she asked, turning briefly from her view of the pool to assess him.

  “Hairline.”

  He was pale—paler than usual, and trembling. A fine sheen of sweat covered his face. Even the backs of his hands were sweating.

  “You look like you’re in pain. Didn’t they give you any pills?”

  He slumped into a chair and set a brown bottle of pills on the dining room table. He made no move to open the bottle or to do anything that might alleviate his discomfort. Kourtney went back to looking at the pool. She really wanted to go out there, but couldn’t seem to make up her mind to open the door and step over the threshold. There were those pool toys in their basket and they were big and bright and so very there that, even though she didn’t look at them she could see them, looming in the periphery.

  “They found another body in the desert.” Jeff’s voice was so soft she wasn’t sure she heard him at first.

  “And?”

  “Her father.” When Kourtney didn’t say anything, Jeff dropped a heavy hand onto the table. Kourtney jumped. “Her real father.”

  The hair on the back of her neck stood up. Another body. “Are you trying to tell me something?” She swallowed, trying to imagine Jeffrey taking a life. Was it possible? How had he spent his time the last days? Listening to music. They were rarely in the same room together unless they were sleeping and he hadn’t been sleeping well at all. He could have easily slipped out in the night.

  Jeff stood and pushed the chair in, wincing a little bit, like he was still in pain. “I was going to ask you the same thing.”

  She snorted. It was an ugly sound, she knew, but she felt ugly right then. He was going to accuse her, frame her. She quickly added pieces in her head. He could kill, if Riley was at stake. If he meant what he said earlier, that he suspected her, then placing another body at her feet would be his perfect revenge. Blaming her for killing the man they’d already done so much damage to.

  The pieces formed an incomplete picture, but one that frightened her anyway.

  He had taken everything from her. He took the baby that she birthed and let it die and then he took Riley from her. “You did it,” she said. “Didn’t you? What happened? Did he come looking for her and you couldn’t bear to let anyone but you have her, so you killed him? Is that what happened?”

  “I think we both know I’m incapable of that sort of thing.” He took another step in her direction, looking very much capable at that instant.

  “You’re a kidnapper, aren’t you? Stealing babies from hospitals?” She threw the words out as violently as fists to keep him at bay. “Has your heart corroded that much over these years?” She knew it had because hers had too. “What else have you done? What else?” She was shouting and at first, Jeff shrank back from her, looking repulsive with that glaze of sweat marking his pale face.

  But then he opened his mouth and roared. It was a raw sound, a coarse, grating sound that ripped his throat. “Enough!”

  Kourtney didn’t think about the door anymore, didn’t think about the colorful toys against the shed. She moved quickly, her flip-flops slapping the tile as sprinted out of the house and broke the “no running” rule she and Jeff had been so careful to enforce around the poolside. The back gate wasn’t far away. She could make it there, escape and then what? Tell the sheriff that her husband was angry because nine years ago she made him kidnap Riley? She made a noise that may have been a sob, or a groan. She didn’t know and it didn’t really matter. She cleared the long side of the pool and turned the corner, moving past the taunting basket of beach toys and then her shoes slipped on the hot stone.

  Briefly, she recalled a conversation with Jeff about cement versus stone. “Cement is safer. Less slippery. Even when smooth stone is dry, your shoes can slip on it.” But it was a meek warning and Kourtney ignored it.

  The memory was no more than a flash, lasting only an instant. But it replayed over and over as she fell, the side of her head striking the hot stone.
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  Jeff loomed above her. Her bare arms and legs burned, but she couldn’t lift them. She opened her mouth to tell him to stay away from her. She felt the blood pooling under her cheek. It was so hot. The stone was so very, very hot. 

  “I think we’re done now,” Jeff said.

  But they weren’t. They weren’t, and if she could talk, she could tell him her plan. They would pack and move south toward Mexico. They’d drive all the way down to South America and take up residence on a beach somewhere. They could be happy.

  If only she could make her mouth move.

  The toe of Jeff’s shoe was sharp in her back. He toed her to the edge of the pool. Sunlight hit the water and broke apart into a million diamonds. Was she already at the beach? She felt faint. And the tiles were so hot.

  He nudged her over the edge of the pool and into the cool water. Kourtney felt instant relief. Finally. He read her mind. She had been so hot. She’d been too hard on Jeff. She knew that. She needed to tone it down a little bit. She would change. She tried to sigh, to explain herself, to voice her gratitude for the coolness of the pool, but her mouth filled with water. She opened her eyes and stared at the bottom getting closer.