Virtue Falls

  “I’ll drive him,” she shouted back. “Help me!”

  Sheriff Foster strolled to the truck. He stood with his hand on his weapon. He sneered. He was going to kill them, shove them off into the canyon, and leave them to rot.

  She stepped in front of Garik.

  She wasn’t brave; her heart beat so hard and fast she could hear it in her brain. Her chin trembled, and her knees shook.

  But she didn’t have a choice. Garik was bleeding.

  Her gaze met Foster’s. She stared at him. Glared at him.

  Then, by God, Sheriff Foster dropped his gaze. He opened the truck’s passenger door and helped hoist Garik inside. He shut the door behind Garik, then he turned to her. “I assume you didn’t do this.”

  “What?” She turned on him with fury and vigor.

  “Who attacked him?”

  “I was attacked. Garik saved me. My assailant ran away.” She ran around to the driver’s door and got in. “Did you think I stabbed him?”

  “Yes. It’s usually the spouse, and you…” He left the words unspoken, but she heard them anyway.

  You’re the girl who saw your father kill your mother with the scissors, so you’re probably like him.

  “Asshole,” she muttered.

  “Take him to the hospital. I’ll be behind you all the way.” Sheriff Foster flipped on his emergency lights.

  “Bastard loves those lights,” Garik muttered.

  She didn’t care. She put the truck in gear and drove.

  Garik reached, and reached, and finally snagged his seatbelt and pulled it over his chest. It took long moments before he got it clicked into place. “Are you hurt?” he asked.

  “No. Yes. My arm.” It ached. “He about yanked it off. And my throat hurts from coughing. But he didn’t cut me. What did he do to you?”

  “Tried to knife me in the heart. Didn’t make it.”

  She glanced over to see him exploring the left side of his ribs.

  “He sliced me pretty good, though. Not one long slice, sort of here and there and jagged. I don’t think his knife was sharp. Hurts worse that way, makes the wounds less serious.” He half-smiled. “I’m okay. Blood loss will be a problem. Shock. All that shit. I’ll be sore. But I’m fine.”

  She wanted to believe him, and the terrible tightness around her chest loosened a little.

  “Who was it?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. The guy … the, the person who attacked Yvonne. Ski mask, leather jacket.” She swallowed. “You didn’t see him … it, either?”

  “No, but I kicked the shit out of him. I couldn’t see well enough to kick his head, so I kicked his ribs.” Garik leaned his head against the back of the seat, and muttered, “It had to be a man.”

  “Did it?”

  “I dunno.”

  “Maybe he’ll have to go to the hospital.”

  “Maybe … maybe he’s one of those hermits who live in the woods, and we’ll never figure out who he is.” Garik sounded tired.

  “That’s true. But he attacked me, and he attacked Yvonne to get into the care facility. So I think we can say you were right. This guy has something to do with my mother’s murder.”

  “So many possibilities…” Garik’s voice faded. He slumped in the seat.

  Blood stained the blanket over his chest.

  Blood will be the problem …

  She drove inland like a bat out of hell, through fog, over crumpled roads, desperate to arrive before the sun drifted to the west and below the horizon. She drove toward darkness and cold stars, and found herself praying to a god in which she didn’t believe.

  Sheriff Foster followed her all the way, lights flashing. He had called ahead; the hospital was expecting them.

  The medical staff put Garik on a gurney, got him into ER, sewed him up, and gave him a unit of blood.

  She sat on a hard chair, unable to look away from the stitching and the IVs. But she didn’t faint. She didn’t even feel like fainting. Her fury kept her upright.

  Someone had attacked her. Garik had come to her rescue. And then the assailant attacked Garik. Stabbed Garik. Tried to murder Garik.

  Never in her life had she known that she could kill someone, but if she found the man, or the woman, who had assaulted them, Elizabeth would gladly take them out. Sitting there, she planned first one attack, then another, using a variety of weapons and a variety of moves.

  Apparently the only way to get over being squeamish was to be vengeful and bloodthirsty.

  When they took Garik away to put him into a private room, Sheriff Foster questioned her. Did she recognize her assailant? How big was he? What did he smell like?

  She recognized the questions; they were essentially the same as the ones Garik had asked Yvonne, and Elizabeth knew just as little. “I didn’t see him. I was coughing,” she said impatiently and for the third time.

  “You were coughing.” Sheriff Foster said it as if he could not believe her.

  “It’s August. When he slammed my head into the grass, I swallowed seeds, they got stuck in my throat, and I thought I was going to choke to death.”

  “And he seemed unhappy with you because you were coughing.” Sheriff Foster clicked his pen.

  “He said, ‘You’re spoiling it.’ No, wait.” She remembered that voice. “‘You’re ruining it.’ Like putting a knife to my throat was something he’d imagined, and I wasn’t reacting like I was supposed to.” She looked down at her hands. Her fingers were trembling.

  “Huh. Well. Interesting.” Sheriff Foster clicked the pen again. “If you think of anything else, give me a call. If your phone works. Which it does since you said it squawked and that was what gave him his target. Let me see the number.”

  She showed him. “I don’t know it.”

  He wrote it down. “It’s probably a burn phone. Anyone can buy one with a preset number of minutes. Very useful if you forgot your phone, or if you’re a criminal.” He clicked the pen again, twice more.

  She watched him. Nervous habit. Sheriff Foster was almost twitching with guilt.

  He clicked the pen one more time, then stuck it in his pocket. “I’ll come back tomorrow to interview Garik. You look like hell. Get some sleep.”

  Since the bags beneath his bloodshot eyes were big enough to take a two-week vacation, she thought that was the pot calling the kettle black.

  The medical staff wanted to x-ray her shoulder, but she wanted to be with Garik. She needed to be with Garik. So she took the aspirin they offered, and hung over him until he began to breathe easily. Then she went into the bathroom and looked in the mirror, realized that not only was Sheriff Foster right, but she also had grass stains on her forehead.

  No wonder he had believed her about the coughing.

  She washed her face, and when she came out, a cot had appeared in the room. Two minutes, she was asleep, and she stayed that way until two A.M., when Dr. Frownfelter walked in the room.

  CHAPTER SEVENTY-ONE

  Garik came wide awake when Dr. Frownfelter shambled in, a big bear of a man in a white coat and two days’ growth of salt-and-pepper beard.

  The doctor walked over to the cot where Elizabeth slept, stood over her, and stared with the most peculiar expression on his face, almost as if he was trying to open the portal to the past, and move her into place.

  Garik disliked seeing him hover there, so he called softly, “Doctor.”

  For a man as tall and big-bellied as he was, Frownfelter walked swiftly and silently to Garik’s side. Picking up his wrist, he took his pulse. “How do you feel?”

  “Good. For a guy who’s been stabbed, real good.” With slight motions, Garik tested his shoulders, his ribs.

  “Give it a couple of days. The pain is waiting to pounce.” Frownfelter listened to Garik’s heart. “Mind if I peel back the dressing and look at the wound?”

  “If you promise not to pull off any hair.” Garik had had quite enough of that for one day.

  “I hear women these days like hairless guys
. Look at it as a free wax job.” But Frownfelter eased off the bandages with an expert touch.

  “I don’t like the price I had to pay for it.” Garik craned his neck to take a look. “What do you think?”

  “Dr. Salas did this? She does good work. But the wounds…” He shook his head. “They look like the guy was trying to do SOS in Morse code. Dot dash dot … The dash looks bad. Ragged.”

  “Lousy knife work. For someone who’s going around attacking people, this guy isn’t very good at it.”

  “This wasn’t done with a knife or a sharp point. This was probably scissors.”

  Dr. Frownfelter’s declaration sent a chill up Garik’s spine. “That’s a positive ID.”

  “You see all kinds of things in med school.” Frownfelter taped the bandages back over Garik’s ribs. “And maybe, since you found Misty’s body, scissors are on my mind.”

  Maybe it was euphoria from the painkillers. But Garik felt well enough to handle a straight-on confrontation with Frownfelter. He pressed the button to move the bed into the sitting position. “You know, Doctor, I had you pegged for a suspect in the Misty Banner murder case.”

  Dr. Frownfelter pushed his glasses up on the top of his head and wearily rubbed his eyes. “I know.”

  That gave Garik a jolt. “Why do you know? Why do you know I’m even revisiting the case?”

  “How could you not? For anyone with a lick of sense, Charles Banner never could have been the murderer.” Frownfelter pulled his glasses back down, placed them on his nose, and looked over the top of them. “You have more than one lick of sense.”

  “I do. You’re right.”

  “What made you decide I wasn’t a suspect?”

  “When that guy attacked Yvonne in the parking lot and wanted her keys to the facility I thought—No, Frownfelter could get in anytime he wants.”

  “You think that attack and the one today are connected to the Banner case?”

  “I suspected it before. This assault on Elizabeth sort of cinched it.” Garik looked him right in the eyes. “But nothing about you adds up, which is why I’m wondering—during the trial, why didn’t you stick up for Charles Banner? I’ve looked at the evidence. You didn’t say one word to support him. You must have been his friend. You followed him from Virtue Falls to prison and back again, but you never presented yourself as a character witness.”

  “At the time, I wasn’t sure he hadn’t done it.”

  “You just said that anyone with a lick of sense knew Charles Banner could never have been the murderer.”

  The visitor chair was shoved against the wall; Dr. Frownfelter pulled it up to the bed. He sat heavily, as if the weight of the world was on his stooped shoulders. “I was … relating.”

  Garik wondered if the pain killers were messing with his head. “Relating to what?”

  “I was Misty Banner’s doctor. I prescribed her prenatal vitamins. Delivered her baby. Did her postpartum examinations.”

  Garik’s suspicions rose again. “You were in love with her.”

  “No. God, no. I was in love with my wife.” Dr. Frownfelter observed Garik shrewdly. “You don’t seem surprised to hear I had a wife.”

  “Margaret told me.”

  “Of course she did. The thing about being a small-town family physician is that you get to deal with everything. Spousal abuse, alcoholism, bipolar disease, flu epidemics, erectile dysfunction, deafness, old age, dying. It’s an interesting life, because there’s such variety. It takes all your time, and all your energy, and sometimes you win, and sometimes … you lose.” Dr. Frownfelter rubbed his neck as if even the memories weighed him down. “In her hour of need, Misty came to me and told me that she was having an affair.”

  Garik’s spine snapped to attention. “So it’s not a rumor. She really was having an affair.”

  “Most definitely. I asked her why, when she had a husband like Charles who worshiped her, she would betray him. She said … she said that her lover was exciting, fascinating, different. That her lover made her forget the pain she felt when she thought of her mother, of her sister, about her terrible, dysfunctional family.” Dr. Frownfelter tilted his head against the back of the chair. “But she said her lover was intense, almost frightening, and she asked what to do. She asked me because I was her doctor, and kind, and smarter than her.”

  Garik could see disaster coming a mile away. “What did you say?”

  “She … her timing was bad.” Dr. Frownfelter rummaged around in his capacious pockets and pulled out a bottle of Tums. He popped a couple and put the bottle back. “The day before, my wife had told me she wanted a divorce. She wanted to live somewhere besides Virtue Falls. Anywhere besides Virtue Falls. So she’d gone to the city, found a doctor at Seattle Children’s Hospital, and they made each other very happy.”

  “I thought she divorced you for infidelity?”

  “I let her put that on the papers. This way at least I didn’t have to admit my wife was screwing around behind my back.” Dr. Frownfelter’s heavy lids drooped over his eyes. “Say what you like, but a man’s got his pride.”

  “All right. I get that. What did you say to Misty?” Garik asked again.

  Dr. Frownfelter looked straight at him. “I told her she should be ashamed, playing around behind Charles’s back, making that good man look like a fool. I told her everyone in town knew what was going on—I had just heard rumors—and asked if she’d even thought about the consequences to her impressionable child. I told her to break it off, and when she tried to tell me she was frightened, I told her she deserved to be afraid. I was furious. I lashed out at her, then ordered her out of my office.” He lifted a shaking hand to his forehead. “The next thing I knew, she was dead. Murdered. Blood all over that house. Everyone said Charles had done it. I was so angry at my wife, I could have killed her, so I thought that was possible. Probable, even. But I wasn’t quite sure … Misty had said she was afraid of her lover. She acted frightened. And I made her break it off. I did that.”

  “You felt guilty.”

  “I didn’t feel guilty. I am guilty.”

  Garik understood that. He understood that far too well.

  Dr. Frownfelter continued, “I’m a doctor. Do no harm, and all that Hippocratic oath stuff. So I stalked Charles Banner, followed him to prison. I wanted to believe he’d done it, that he really had killed his wife. It would have relieved some of my heartburn.” Dr. Frownfelter lifted the bottle of Tums out of his pocket again, and showed Garik, then dropped it back in.

  “And?”

  “Charles isn’t like me. He doesn’t carry a grudge. He doesn’t hate the past. He can forgive his wife. Me? Not a chance. I don’t want to kill my ex-wife anymore, but when her hotshot Seattle doctor divorced her, I did a happy dance. Which with my figure, was something to see.” Dr. Frownfelter patted his belly. “Once I was convinced Charles hadn’t done it, I did do everything I could to get him released from prison. But it was too late. The damage had been done.”

  “If you’re not the one who killed Misty Banner, and Charles isn’t the one who killed her, who does it leave?”

  “A whole helluva lot of men.” Dr. Frownfelter glanced at Elizabeth, still asleep on the cot. “Every straight guy in town wanted Misty Banner.”

  “That’s exactly what Margaret said.”

  “Margaret’s shrewd, and she’s right. If you’re investigating the crime, you’re going to have to look at every guy who lived here then.” Dr. Frownfelter stood. “And a few of the women.”

  “Who’s your top candidate?” Garik was very interested in the answer.

  But Dr. Frownfelter shook his head. “Look, kid. I got someone killed for saying the wrong thing. I learn from my lessons. I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

  Garik put pressure on. “People are getting hurt. Me. Elizabeth. Yvonne Rudda.”

  “You’re an FBI agent. Be more careful with yourself, and with Elizabeth.”

  “What about Yvonne?”

  “All kinds of people are a
lways in and out of hospitals. There’s not much security to speak of, not in a regional hospital like this, not during this kind of crisis. So when Yvonne was here, I watched over her, made sure she was safe.”

  Garik sat up straight and fast, then winced at the tug of pain. “What do mean, when she was here?”

  “She went home this morning.”

  “Home? By herself?”

  Dr. Frownfelter gently pushed Garik back on the pillows. “Sheila’s staying with her.”

  “Two women staying in an isolated house when there’s a killer loose?” Were they out of their minds?

  Dr. Frownfelter lifted his hands, and let them fall. “The hospital’s full. We’re still getting injuries from the earthquake. We’ve got three beds per room. Yvonne couldn’t stay. And she would not go to the shelter.”

  “She could stay with Sheila.” Obvious solution.

  “Sheila’s got problems at home—unemployed husband, troubled kids from her first marriage. Yvonne and Sheila are smart women. They deal with difficult patients every day, and sometimes violence. We’re going to have to trust they’ll play it safe.”

  “Yeah. Sure.” Garik wasn’t so sanguine about the situation, but then, Dr. Frownfelter didn’t know everything he knew. “I did kick the son-of-a-bitch, and got in a few good punches. Has anybody come in with broken ribs, contusions?”

  Dr. Frownfelter scratched his head. “We had Big Blake Daniels come in looking pretty bad, but I don’t think that’s who you want.”

  “Why not?”

  “His wife beat him up—again.” Dr. Frownfelter patted Garik’s shoulder. “Look, I have to go. I’m supposed to be catching some Zs, not chatting with you. You’ve got a lot to think about, but try to get some rest. You’re going to feel those incisions in the morning.” He shambled out.

  Elizabeth slowly rolled over. She looked at Garik. “Whoa,” she whispered.

  “You were awake the whole time?” Garik wasn’t surprised.

  “Having someone stand over the top of me is not conducive to sleep. Not after … what happened this afternoon.” Elizabeth clumsily pushed her blanket aside. “My mother definitely had an affair.”