Hidden Summit

  “Brie, I don’t care that you read it,” he said. “I gave you permission anyway.”

  “I thought you should know something. What you do with it is entirely up to you, but you should know. She knew she was sick, Conner. When she met you and married you, she thought she could tame her wild compulsions by being hooked up to you, and she has regrets about that, about the position she put you in. She didn’t suddenly learn she was a sex addict when you caught her with another man. She thought you were the kind of man who could ground her, slow her down, keep her happy, so to speak. That was before she knew very much about her disease.”

  “Disease,” he said in a grumble.

  “Did you know that? That she married you with that agenda?”

  “No. And I don’t know that I buy that whole disease thing, either.”

  “I know,” Brie said. “I don’t really get it, either. But then there are a lot of things I have trouble understanding. I don’t understand why smart, strong women let men hit them, and yet I end up helping a lot of them. The human condition, Conner, is complex and often confusing. But there’s one thing I do know—holding a grudge isn’t going to help. I hope you can let it go soon. I realize you didn’t feel the need for any information from her letter, but I wanted to be sure you knew that. Conner, it wasn’t your fault in any way. She knows it and you should know it.”

  Leslie hadn’t met Dan’s fiancée, Cheryl, even though she’d helped Dan with some of his housewarming party details. She called Cheryl just the same. “Let me come over a little early on Sunday and help you around the house or kitchen,” she said. “You probably have a lot of people coming and tons to do.”

  “That’s so nice of you,” she said. “It’s appreciated.”

  So Leslie, armed with her favorite Merlot and a bunch of flowers, headed to Dan and Cheryl’s new house. They’d built in the countryside, far enough up the side of a hill to afford them a decent view. It was a small house at the end of a long, curly drive, and while there was still plenty to do around the yard, it was a nice-looking brick-and-wood ranch. There were a few pots of flowers flanking the front door.

  The front door was opened by a lovely, smiling woman. “Hi, I’m Leslie,” she said, cradling the wine and flowers in one hand and sticking out the other.

  “Gee, it’s nice to finally meet you. Dan is one of your biggest fans.”

  “And I’m one of his,” Leslie said, entering. She held out the flowers and wine. “These are for you.”

  “You’re so sweet,” Cheryl said, taking the flowers. “I don’t drink, but if you’d like a glass of that… I don’t even know if there’s a corkscrew in the house.... Maybe Dan has one on that fancy knife of his. Want me to ask?”

  “Gee, I never even thought to ask,” Leslie said. “Since I’ve seen Dan at Jack’s…”

  “He likes a cold beer sometimes,” Cheryl said, heading for the kitchen. Once there she put the wine and flowers on the counter; the work island was full of food trays in progress—a veggie tray, potato and corn chips still in bags sitting in big bowls, a couple of large Crock-Pots, bags of buns, condiments, relishes such as pickles, onions, tomatoes. “He doesn’t overdo it,” Cheryl went on. “He’s one of the lucky ones. An amputee doesn’t want to throw himself off balance.” And then she laughed. “Have you ever seen Dan on one leg?”

  “I’ve heard,” Leslie said.

  “He’s pretty amazing. He says it’s a survival instinct. And me? I don’t drink because I’m a recovering alcoholic.”

  “I didn’t know,” Leslie said, somewhat embarrassed.

  “Then you’re probably just about the only one. I had quite a reputation back in the drinking days. I’ve been sober three years.”

  “Congratulations. Is that the appropriate thing to say? Congratulations?”

  “I’ll take it,” she said with a laugh. “They knew they had a tough one when they saw me coming.” Cheryl opened a cupboard and pulled out a vase for the flowers.

  “They?” Leslie asked before she could stop herself.

  “Sorry, I spend so much time talking to other people in recovery sometimes I forget there are people who haven’t faced all that. AA. Rehab. And I’ve been taking courses toward a counseling degree. I work at the college, get discounted courses, and my dream job is working with people in recovery.”

  “Wow. I’m surprised Dan never mentioned any of this. I mean, I knew you had a job at the college, but…”

  “Oh, Dan wouldn’t say anything. He’s very good that way. These are my issues to talk about or not talk about. He leaves that entirely up to me and I appreciate it. A couple of years ago I couldn’t talk about it. Now I can’t shut up about it.” She arranged the flowers in the vase. “How’s this?” she asked. “I’m completely untrained in domestic skills.”

  “Looks great. I know there’s a lot going on at the moment and we should get this food together, but I’d love to see the house if there’s time. Dan talks about it all the time. He’s so proud of it.”

  “He should be—it’s almost entirely his project. He stays off ladders and scaffolding, but everything else has his fingerprints all over. Come on, it won’t take a minute—it’s a small house.” And with that she led the way. First, they walked through the living room/dining room to a large master bedroom and bath. The master formed an L-shape with the living/dining so that doors in that room opened onto a deck also. There were also two more small bedrooms—one set up as an office. “This is for me,” she said. “Some women dream of a sewing room—I wanted an office with a computer so I could research and study. This is something I never imagined possible when I was a kid!”

  A small powder room separated the two small bedrooms. Back in the living/dining room, Cheryl opened the doors wide onto the wooden deck as they walked outside. The house had a short yard that backed right up to the hill and the trees. “We have all kinds of animals that wander right up to the house. Deer, bear, puma, you name it. This is the most relaxing spot in the house, right on this deck. If you’re real quiet in the early morning or early evening, animals might come close enough for you to count their eyelashes.”

  “Okay on the deer,” Leslie said. “You might want to be real careful of the others.”

  “I’m careful,” she said. Cheryl looked up at the trees that surrounded her house and took a deep breath. “I’m careful not to take this for granted, too.” After a moment, she turned to look at Leslie. “Let’s get the food ready. We’ll have company pretty soon, I think.”

  Leslie didn’t realize the significance of the day for Cheryl until Paige Middleton explained it as best she could. According to Paige, Cheryl felt as though she’d left the town in shame, having been driven out of town to an alcohol treatment facility. Mel, Jack’s wife, was the one to find her a program that the county paid for, the beginning of the rest of her life. Then she’d stayed in Eureka for months, living with some women in a halfway house and slowly but surely falling in love with Dan Brady.

  “She’s been very slow, probably reluctant to come back to us, as if she couldn’t shake her reputation. I’m pretty sure she expected to be judged harshly. Plus, I’m sure she has a lot of negative memories of growing up in Virgin River, the place where she got into so much trouble as a youth.” Paige shrugged. “There are plenty of people ready to take that judgmental role, I guess. Most of us, though, are just so grateful she was able to save herself. Cheryl is an amazing woman. She’s going to be a great counselor. I have no doubt she’ll help many people.”

  When more people started to arrive, Leslie positioned herself in the kitchen so she could help them find paper cups and paper plates and then be sure the discarded made it into the trash. From around two till five, friends both from Virgin River and Cheryl’s college made their way to the house. They didn’t come in droves but in manageable numbers. There were perhaps twenty from t
own, and Leslie knew them all, from the Haggertys to the Sheridans. There were a few of Haggerty’s crews—men Dan had worked with. And the rest were Cheryl’s friends from Eureka. And people didn’t stay long—an hour, hour and a half. Just long enough to see the new house, have a bite to eat, congratulate the happy couple.

  When Conner arrived, Leslie was aware of him the minute he entered the house. Her eyes went to him, and the feeling that came over her was like a swelling in her heart, a shudder of instant desire and love. He was such a beautiful man, so tall and strong, and those blue eyes were instantly on her. Then his lips curved in a smile only for her, and he was quickly at her side. He slipped an arm around her waist and touched her temple with his lips.

  Cut her losses? What losses? He was the best man she’d ever known.

  All around them people noticed their intimacy and smiled.

  These people didn’t realize that in addition to being a good man, a handsome man, Conner had the courage of ten men. She was so proud of him.

  After helping Cheryl get the kitchen under control, she was only too glad to say goodbye to her new friends and whisk him away to have all to herself. Every minute felt as if it went by too quickly.

  Thirteen

  Conner and Leslie tried very hard not to amp up their courtship just because Conner’s upcoming testimony loomed. It would be easy to dive in, to virtually move in together and spend every waking moment in each other’s company. Tempting, but not practical, not when both of them were still coming to terms with who they were in this new, second life.

  “Like putting on a new skin,” Conner said to her. “We’re going to end up together, I’m pretty confident of that. And when we do, I want you to feel secure about what you’re getting yourself into. We’re not going to take any chances. I don’t want you to ever regret your choices.”

  Still, if they were together at the end of the day, they were usually still together first thing in the morning.

  “One of these days, we’re going to take the next step,” Leslie told him. “The sheets on the bed in that little cabin aren’t getting much of a workout.”

  For the time being, they spent at least a couple of nights a week on their own. On one such night, Conner sat at his laptop in his cabin and worked on an email.

  Dear Samantha, I saw the last letter you sent. It’s the first one since our parting of the ways—I shredded the previous ones. Maybe I was afraid to read them, I don’t know. I’d like to share where I am in life right now, so we can both put this behind us. First of all, I’ve moved on. I’m happy in ways I was never happy before, and that has nothing to do with any failing of yours. Second, I don’t have any hard feelings toward you. True, I did for a long time, but I really feel free of that now, free enough to tell you I wish you all the best. And third, now that we’ve both had that chance to clear the air, to forgive and forget, to get things off our chests, I’d like to move on without the baggage, without further explanations or contact from you, without reminders of everything that went on before. I want to think of you as a woman I was once close to, a woman who has moved on to a new life that doesn’t include me. And if I could ask one favor, I’d like you to remember me as a man who once cared about you, and who did the best he could with a difficult set of circumstances. Believe me, I know that’s asking a lot; I know it can’t seem like I tried, but I did the best I could at the time.

  I’m letting go of it now, Samantha. No grudges, no obsessive remembering, no self-pity.

  Good luck to you. Be well.

  Danny

  When he was done and mostly satisfied, he created a new, free email account and sent his email to her email address. He waited a little while to see if the email bounced back as undeliverable and was not surprised when it didn’t. She was keeping things the same in case he ever succumbed to the urge to reach out to her. He didn’t give it much time—an hour or so. When it didn’t bounce back, he closed and canceled that email account.

  Done.

  The very next morning, it began. He was not prepared, though he should’ve been. The pretrial jury selection started a rush of press about the crime he’d witnessed and speculation about the trial.

  Conner spent a lot of time reading the news online before he went to work. He was working with Dan Brady on a kitchen renovation. He kept his ears sharp all day, but the news of a murder trial in Sacramento didn’t seem to spark any interest in Virgin River. He even stopped by the bar before heading over to Leslie’s house just to see if anyone was talking about it.

  He had to give the press some credit—there was speculation about witnesses and even some curiosity about whether the prosecution’s witness might have any connection to the hardware store where the crime was committed, the hardware store that had burned to the ground. But unless there were articles he was unaware of, they were not putting names to their speculation. He didn’t see his name in any press, yet they would have known it was him—his name had appeared as probable cause on the search warrant that was used to search Mathis’s car and home and arrest him.

  A name he did see quite a bit of was Dickie Randolph, the victim. Randolph had been pretty well-known for dabbling in the underworld of drugs and prostitution.

  Yet there was more—Randolph had invested in some of Mathis’s condo properties, and it was speculated that Mathis could be a silent partner in some of Randolph’s businesses. And of course a sleazeball like Dickie Randolph had a lot of ancillary characters involved in his businesses, as well.

  Motive? The press hadn’t uncovered one yet, unless there had been some sort of bad blood between the two that had gone unnoticed thus far. In fact, if Conner hadn’t seen Mathis do the shooting, there would have been many other individuals who would have been suspect.

  As the police had told Conner a long time ago—everyone in this case was dirty. But as far as what they could prove in a court of law, only Regis Mathis had committed murder.

  Conner was a little uncertain how to handle the flood of news where Leslie was concerned. In the end he told her to get out her laptop and log on so they could look at some of it together, while he was still in town to help her understand the details and what he knew about the stories. They sat at her kitchen table, and he ran the search, bringing up pictures and articles from the Sacramento newspaper.

  Most of the pictures that would be used as evidence, such as the blood splatters in the car that were illuminated by the luminol the police used, were not available to the press, but there were photos they couldn’t control. The Dumpster where the body had been dumped, for example, with the long streak of blood running down the side and the yellow crime-scene tape stretching across the area. The covered body on the gurney that was being loaded in to the ambulance.

  “Where were you?” Leslie asked.

  “I had just walked out the back door of the store,” he said. “I heard the car door, noticed a man walking around the front of the car to the passenger side. He was pulling a gun out of his pocket at the same time he opened the passenger door and he shot him in the head. I ducked behind the Dumpster. It was fast and brutal. Over, body dumped and car backing out of the alley, in a couple of minutes or less. I looked in the Dumpster first—the man’s hands and feet were bound with duct tape, a strip across his mouth.”

  “And you called the police right away?”

  “My cell phone was on my belt,” he said. “The dispat
cher asked me if I could check for a pulse. He was very dead.”

  And of course there was a picture of the skeletal remains of a once large and prosperous hardware store.

  “Do they know it’s you? That you’re the witness?”

  He shrugged. “Of course they know—my name appears on the warrant. Before this is over, my picture will be in the paper. If there’s a leak in the D.A.’s office, they might know where I am. Either way, the burned building is a message sent to anyone who might be considering testifying against Regis Mathis. I had a more direct message, left on my voice mail at home. Just in case I wondered if they knew where I lived.”

  “And if you didn’t testify? Would you be forgotten?”

  “There are way too many unknowns,” Conner said. “I called the police within minutes of the murder,” Conner said. “If no other witness appeared, would they consider their warning had scared me off? Or would they try to ensure I remained scared off? Because what I saw, Les, was horrible. If that happened to a member of my family, I’d hope to God someone had the balls to step up.”

  “Of course you have to,” she said.

  “And the hard part for you, Les, you have to act like you didn’t even notice any of this has been happening. At least until the trial is over.”

  She laughed softly. “Do you think I’d have trouble doing that if it means keeping you and your family safe?”

  “If you get overwhelmed or freaked out, you can talk to Brie.”

  “But I’ll talk to you, too. Won’t I?”

  “Sure we will.” He put down the laptop screen, blocking the stories and images, and gently traced the line of her jaw. “Yes, we’ll talk. Probably every day.” He leaned toward her to give her a light kiss. “Let’s be done with this for now. Let’s sit on the back porch and talk about regular things. Let’s pretend life is normal.”