Virtue Falls

  Was it all a sham?

  Was it true, what that awful Foster woman said? That Misty and her lover and the whole world were laughing at him?

  Charles put his hand on his chest.

  His pride hurt. It really did. But he had always known he was too old for Misty, that she should have a younger man.

  It wasn’t his pride that had broken. It was his heart. If this was true, if all these years Misty had lied to him …

  Except … he didn’t believe that of Misty. Perhaps she had made a mistake. Perhaps she had fallen in bed with another man for reasons Charles didn’t understand. But he couldn’t believe she had never loved him. For over five years, he had known her, lived with her, talked to her, and she was a woman of sincere feelings and gentle depths.

  And she loved their baby. She was a wonderful mother, spending hours with Elizabeth, teaching her, laughing with her, holding her.

  He had to remember what he had witnessed in Misty, the joy she had brought him, and go into the house with the attitude that if she was willing, they could work this out.

  He got out and slammed the car door.

  Usually when he drove up, Misty and Elizabeth came out, and Elizabeth ran to him and hugged him, and Misty kissed his cheek and smiled at him.

  Today, although the front door was open and the screen door shut, everything was silent.

  Perhaps they’d gone for a walk.

  Or perhaps Misty had heard about the scene at the diner, and sat inside waiting to talk to him.

  He didn’t know what to hope for.

  He walked up the stairs, his footsteps reluctant and heavy. He opened the screen door and stepped inside the living room.

  The windows were open, the lace curtains blowing in the ocean breeze. But the room was empty.

  He took a disappointed breath … his home even smelled different to him, bitterly metallic, as if something had spilled and not been wiped up.

  Misty had placed a large area rug in the middle of the hardwood floor, and as soon as he stepped on it he knew something had indeed spilled.

  The rug squished beneath his shoes.

  He looked down in concern. Had the kitchen sink overflowed? Had Elizabeth flushed a toy down the toilet? They would have to call the plumber …

  He took another few steps.

  The rug grew wetter, the moisture squeezing up around his white running shoes … it was red. Dark red.

  What had happened here?

  Even then, with the evidence before his eyes, he didn’t understand.

  “Misty?” he called. “Elizabeth?”

  The house echoed eerily.

  If he hadn’t had a four-year-old, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the sharp, silvery blade tossed carelessly on the wide seat of the Morris chair. But he did have a child, and scissors were a dangerous thing to leave lying around. He picked them up.

  They were sticky with red.

  He stared at them. Knelt and put his knee on the rug. Saw the red ooze up around and into his faded blue jeans. Put his hand to the floor, then lifted it and stared at his bloody palm.

  That’s when his mind comprehended.

  Bloody scissors. Bloody shoes. Bloody hand. Blood-soaked rug.

  And that smell was the smell of blood and fear and death.

  He lifted his gaze.

  Blood spattered the pale green wall and the framed photo of their family.

  Faint with fear, he stumbled as he got to his feet. He wiped his hand on his T-shirt. He thought he screamed their names. “Misty! Elizabeth!”

  He ran into the hallway and down to the master bedroom, clutching the scissors, thinking that perhaps the killer was still lurking inside, that he, Charles, could take him out.

  No one in the bedroom. No sign of Misty. No sign of Elizabeth.

  No sign of blood.

  He ran to Elizabeth’s little bedroom, decorated with dragons and fairies.

  No one inside. No one at all.

  No blood.

  He stood, trembling, desperate to find them, to save his family from whatever horror had occurred here. And he heard a shuffling sound in the closet, like a mouse. Like a frightened child.

  Or someone who was dying.

  He flung the door open. It was dark in here, an old-fashioned walk-in closet with hanging rods on two sides, a light bulb dangling from the ceiling, the house’s fuse box against the wall. Misty had built shelves at the back and a big chest with a lid so Elizabeth could put her own toys away.

  She never did. He always had to coax her, help her, and even now, her dolls and LEGOs and cars were scattered across the floor.

  The lid on the toy box was closed.

  The perfect place for a small girl to hide.

  The perfect coffin where a small girl could die.

  “Elizabeth, it’s Daddy.” He flipped on the light. “Sweetheart, please tell me you’re in here.” He walked toward the box, making a path, shoving toys aside with his bloodstained shoes. In hope and dread, he lifted the lid.

  Elizabeth was there, her blue eyes big, dry, horrified.

  No blood. He saw no blood.

  He reached in for her.

  She cowered, trying to make herself as tiny as possible, and in the reflection of her fear, he saw what she saw.

  He was covered in blood. And he still held the scissors.

  He didn’t know what to do. His joyous, open, happy child had been transformed.

  She was afraid of him.

  He placed the scissors on the floor. He knelt beside the toy chest. “Are you okay, sweetheart? Are you hurt?”

  She shook her head in tiny, jerky motions.

  “Do you know where Mommy is?”

  She stopped shaking her head, then started again, the motions bigger now.

  She was lying. She had seen it. Whatever had happened here today, she had seen it.

  “It’s okay,” he said. God, he was lying to her. It was never going to be okay again. “I’ll take care of you. Do you want me to take care of you?”

  A hesitation.

  Then she scrambled up, into his embrace, throwing her arms around his neck and her legs around his chest, clinging, trying to burrow into him, looking for a hiding place, a safe place.

  He rocked her, stroked her face, making crooning noises, trying to give comfort when he knew—he knew—there was none to give.

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-THREE

  But a sense of lingering danger drove Charles to shift his daughter to one hip. Picking up the scissors again, he got to his feet.

  His wife was missing. Someone had killed here today. Someone had been killed. And someone might soon realize a witness remained alive …

  They had to get out of here.

  He hurried to the closet door, stopped, and listened.

  Except for the breeze that carried the eternal rhythm of the ocean, the house was silent.

  He moved noiselessly to the bedroom door. Out into the hall. Before they stepped into the blood-soaked living room, he whispered to Elizabeth, “Close your eyes, sweetheart. Don’t look. Promise you won’t look.”

  She made herself as small as possible, scrunched her eyes shut, and pushed her head against his neck.

  He hurried through the living room, trying not to look himself, trying not to remember, wishing he could turn back time, wishing he had come here as soon as that Foster woman had given him the news. While he had gone to think things through, Misty had been … murdered.

  God. Oh, God.

  So much blood. Misty’s blood.

  As he and Elizabeth stepped out on the porch, he heard the sound of a vehicle approaching. In fear and fury, he looked up the long gravel drive—and it was the mail truck! Thank God, the mail truck.

  His postal carrier saw him and slammed on his brakes.

  The two men stared at each other.

  Then … then the son-of-a-bitch of a mailman lifted his camera and took a picture.

  Elizabeth looked up, making soundless mewls of terror.

 
Charles tried to shout for help, but his voice caught in his throat.

  Then, as if the demons of hell were after him, the postal carrier backed up, did a three-point turn, and drove off, spitting gravel from his tires.

  Charles stood, breathing heavily, unsure what to do next.

  Go back in and call the police? Yes. But he couldn’t go back in there. He couldn’t take Elizabeth back in there.

  In a turmoil, he sat heavily on the step and put Elizabeth in his lap. “Who did this?” he asked Elizabeth. “Can you tell Daddy who did this?”

  While tears spilled down her cheeks and through the blood that had somehow made its way to her face, she shook her head again. And again.

  Getting out his handkerchief, he licked the white cotton and wiped at the blood, and realized his hands were still stained with red.

  “Daddy has to go inside and call the police.”

  She flung her arms around his neck again and clung.

  “Can you close your eyes so I can go call the police?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  He stood.

  At that moment, in the distance, he heard a siren.

  Thank God. Someone—the damned cowardly postal carrier—had called the law. Charles stood, waiting, holding his daughter in his arms, stroking her hair, murmuring hushed words of comfort in her ears, waiting for help …

  The last thing he remembered from that day was shouting and crying, trying to cling to his daughter … as they tore her out of his arms.

  After that, nothing mattered.

  Not the way they slammed him to the porch, not the way they cuffed his hands behind him, not the way they shoved him into the back of the patrol car.

  Nothing mattered except that last glimpse of Elizabeth as she silently wept, and strained to reach him.

  * * *

  Charles sat, hands upturned in his lap, staring at nothing.

  Garik wiped his sweating forehead. “Jesus Christ. They didn’t listen to you at all? They never searched for another killer?”

  “I couldn’t hold on to my baby.” Charles’s voice was dull and soft. “Elizabeth was a little girl. She thought I was invincible. She thought her daddy could do anything. And I couldn’t hold on to her. I lost her. She thinks I abandoned her. Of course. That’s what any child would think…”

  Of course. Charles was right. No wonder Elizabeth didn’t speak for a year and a half. No wonder she didn’t trust. No wonder she demanded logic in her life.

  Emotion had failed her. Love had failed her. She had been irrevocably scarred and nothing could change that.

  “Listen.” Garik leaned his elbows on his knees and looked straight into Charles’s eyes. “I need to know the name of Misty’s lover. You have to know who he was. Who? Just tell me. Even if you’re wrong, I want to know who you suspect.”

  “I never did know who it could be … until this morning when Elizabeth showed me those drawings. She was convinced I had done them, and I … I don’t remember … there’s so many blanks in my mind. But I sat in the garden in the sunlight, and I could see … and I know I didn’t do them.” Charles shook his head. “Misty didn’t do them. They were too good for that.”

  “So … Bradley Hoff.” Garik stood up. “Misty’s killer is Bradley Hoff.”

  “He’s after my baby.” Charles shuddered. “He wants to kill my baby.”

  “It’s okay. Elizabeth is at the dig. She’s got those nerdy science guys with her.” Garik was talking, convincing Charles, convincing himself. “She promised she would stay with them until I picked her up.” But Garik had to confirm.

  He pulled out his cell phone. He had power. He had signal.

  He called Elizabeth.

  The call went right to voice mail.

  He hung up, and turned to run out the door.

  Charles grabbed his arm with surprising strength. “You can’t leave me here. I have to go with you.”

  The old guy would be a liability. He would hold Garik up. But fair was fair.

  Garik helped Charles stand. He took him by the arm. “Yeah. Yeah, I could use the help.”

  CHAPTER EIGHTY-FOUR

  It was two o’clock before Elizabeth lifted her head from her patch of dirt. “I’m going to take a break,” she told Ben.

  He lifted a hand in acknowledgment. “Don’t go far.”

  The news about Yvonne had made the rounds fast. Plus Elizabeth was pretty sure her research team was embarrassed that they’d left her alone the night she’d been attacked. They weren’t bad guys; she’d just come into an all-boys club and been the outsider, and the one person who could have assisted her to gain entry, Andrew Marrero, had been too much of a bully to help.

  Today Ben, Luke, and Joe made sure they stayed close.

  Elizabeth walked to one of the biggest boulders deposited by the tsunami, climbed up, and pulled out her bottle of water. The rare, warm, dry August days had turned the mud to dust, and the dust parched her throat. She took a long drink, and looked out over the horizon.

  Ben had decided they should work in an area not far from the sea. Marrero hadn’t approved the change, but Ben said another earthquake would bring another tsunami, and they needed to catalog as many changes as they could before that happened. Unspoken was the agreement that Marrero would have a fit when he returned. Also unspoken was that no one cared.

  Sitting here she heard the constant, low rhythm of the waves, smelled the spicy cypress, and through the loose, hanging branches and dense sprays of dark green foliage, she could see the sunlight on the deep blue ocean.

  The work had done what she hoped: freed her mind from anxiety, grief, and worry, and given her thoughts a chance to rattle loose from the depths of her subconscious.

  Yes, she might be right. Perhaps her father had learned to draw, and with the Alzheimer’s, lost the skill. But when Charles looked at that sketch of Misty, he seemed almost grief-stricken. Heart-sore.

  Elizabeth understood.

  She didn’t want to look at that drawing and think of some man watching her mother so closely that he sketched a masterpiece. Because if that was true, then the picture Elizabeth treasured so much had been drawn by Misty’s lover.

  She dug her album out of her bag, found the drawing, and pulled it loose. Flipping it over, she searched for a signature.

  Nothing.

  She turned it over again, and stared at the sketch, created with care and inspiration in pencil and charcoal, and yet … not signed.

  The watercolor of her mother kneeling in the sand beside a tow-haired child had been signed. She remembered the scrawl in the lower right-hand corner …

  Elizabeth’s hands began to shake. The black-and-white drawing wavered, replaced in her brain by a drawing of luminous pastels. She saw a child’s chubby fingers holding that painting, touching that painting. She remembered loving that painting …

  Or did she? Perhaps this was not a memory, but a dream, the fantasy of a lonely, motherless child. Yet in her mind’s eye, she could see it so clearly.

  Pulling out her phone, she started to call Garik.

  A piece of paper fluttered out of the side pocket.

  A note, in Garik’s handwriting: In case we lose cell service again—meet me at your old house at three. By then, I’ll have something to show you.

  She didn’t believe it. When would he have put that in her bag? Why not just tell her?

  She called him.

  “Damn it to hell.” She didn’t have service.

  She examined the note again.

  No way around it. This was Garik’s handwriting: loose, large, distinctive.

  She flung her bag over her shoulder. She called down to the guys, “I’m going to walk up to the top of the canyon and see if I can get through to Garik.”

  Shaken from their concentration, Ben, Luke, and Joe looked up from the work in disgust.

  Joe stood. “I’ll walk you.” To the other two, he said, “I’ve got to take a leak, anyway.”

  Elizabeth almost grinned. Rel
entlessly practical, these guys—if she was going to tear one of them away from the work, he might as well take the break that refreshes.

  Joe and Elizabeth made the climb to the rim of the canyon.

  Joe visited the Port-a-Potty.

  Elizabeth tried her phone. Nothing. No bars. No service.

  Joe came out, adjusting his waistband.

  “Can you make a call?” she asked him.

  He gave his phone a try, and shook his head. “Nope. Even when we haven’t had a couple of sizable earthquakes, this close to the Pacific, service is iffy.”

  “Yes.” She looked down at the note still clutched in her hand. “The thing is, I’ve got a note from Garik telling me to meet him at my old house.”

  “Your old house? You mean, where your father—”

  She cut Joe off before he could repeat the words she had heard so many times in the past. The words that she now knew were not true. “Yes. That house. Garik says he’s got something to show me. So I’m going to go ahead and see what he wants.”

  Joe put his hands on his hips and tried to look manly, rather than nerdy. “You can’t go alone.”

  She shouldn’t. She looked at the note again. She looked at the black-and-white drawing. She thought about the watercolor. And she thought about Garik, waiting for her with news about the killer. “It’s not far. There’s nothing between here and there. I know what you’re thinking—I’m thinking it, too—but logically, I can’t see a murderer figuring out that I’m anywhere but at the research site.”

  She had spoken the magic scientific word. Logically.

  “That makes sense. But I’ll go with you anyway.” Joe went to the rim and shouted, “I’m taking Elizabeth to her old house to meet Garik.” The two of them started walking. “I have to go,” he told her. “If by some chance something happened to you and I didn’t, Garik would crush me like a bug.”

  “That is so true.” She tried again to grin. She couldn’t quite do it. Because she was scared. She was jumpy. She was hopeful. She was intent on their destination, yet she managed to chat as they walked the mile to the empty house on the empty plateau above the sea.