Abandon

Twenty-Six

Bernadette wasn’t surprised to find Gus’s truck in her driveway when she arrived at the lake. The weather had delayed her, and it would be like him to make sure she got home alive. As she got out of her car, she could feel the stiffness from the long drive in her lower back, her right hip.

Getting old, she thought, welcoming the feel of the cool early evening air, freshened by the passing front. A stiff breeze blew through the trees. She could smell the sharpness of wet pine needles and hear birds all around the lake, twittering and fluttering now that the storm was over.

She found Gus down on the dock, the wood soft and wet under her driving shoes. The lake was choppy, churned up by the wind. “My cell phone died or I’d have called,” she said. “I pulled over during the worst of the storm and had coffee and pie.” She smiled and added, “Peach pie.”

Gus eyed her in that frank, uncompromising way he had. “I almost called the marshals on you.”

Bernadette’s heart jumped at his seriousness. She knew him so well. She remembered the tears and anger and hope she and her friends had felt when he’d left for Vietnam. They’d thought they understood the world, but they’d understood nothing. He didn’t write during the months he was gone. But she didn’t write, either, and only years later did she recognize her fault in that omission. She’d simply tried not to think about Gus Winter and what he was doing, where he was. And when he came back and kept to himself, hiking, working, she’d pushed ahead with her own life and left him to his. Then came his brother and sister-in-law’s deaths, a tragedy so impossible to imagine that it paralyzed everyone – everyone except Gus.

“Gus,” she whispered. “What’s happened?”

“Harris Mayer is dead. Mackenzie and Andrew Rook found him earlier today.”

“Harris? How?” Bernadette tried to grasp what Gus had just said, and pictured Harris, with his bow ties and wingtips, his patrician manner, his compulsions. “I can’t believe it. Did he have a heart attack? It wasn’t -” She paused to catch her breath. “Gus, was Harris murdered?”

Gus wasn’t one to dance around a point. “He was knifed to death.”

Bernadette heard herself gasp, but she couldn’t speak. She stared out at the water, spotting two loons near the opposite shore. They were territorial birds, the only pair on the relatively small lake. They’d had babies in June, and she’d taken delight, as always, watching them ride along on their parents’ backs.

I just want to watch the loons.

“Beanie?”

Years in the courtroom had accustomed her to suppressing her emotions, but she could feel her throat tighten. “Harris got such a kick out of the loons. He and his wife would sit out here for the longest time. I never had the patience.” She blinked back tears and turned to Gus, who didn’t seem to have moved at all since she’d arrived. She tried to pull herself together. “Things change. Harris was flawed, troubled, brilliant, selfish…”

“I’m sorry, Beanie.”

Gus’s simple statement ripped right through the shield she was trying to put up around her emotions. Tears spilled down her cheeks. She wiped them away quickly, turning from him. “Who told you?”

“Nate called. Mackenzie and Rook found Harris at a rooming house in a rough section of Washington.”

Bernadette nodded. “I know which one. Mackenzie and I – she was with me when I went to rescue him one day. She must have remembered. Is that what Nate told you?”

“Yes.”

“Harris was a friend, and he called me for help. I picked him up and took him home, and I never did it again. He never asked, so it was easy to just…to just walk away.” She turned to Gus. “Do the police have a suspect?”

He shook his head. “Nate asked if I’d seen Cal.”

“Cal? What? Is he a suspect?”

“I just said -”

“I know what you just said.” She immediately regretted her sharp tone. A strong breeze brought out goose bumps on her bare arms, and she shivered. “You’ve never liked Cal.”

Gus shrugged. “I don’t have to like him. I’m not the one who married him.”

“You didn’t approve -”

“Was I supposed to?” He didn’t raise his voice. “He’s out of your life now. Maybe it’s time you stopped looking after him.”

Bernadette grabbed Gus’s arm just above the elbow and squeezed hard. “Gus, what aren’t you telling me?”

“Beanie…”

“We’ve known each other since we were kids,” she said. “I was here when you went off to Vietnam. I was here when Harry and Jill were killed. I’m not a stranger. I know you.” She dropped her hand from his arm. “If there’s something you need to tell me, just do it.”

He squinted out at the lake, the loons gone now, as if they’d sensed the tension across the water on the dock and had taken cover. Without preamble, Gus said, “Cal brought women to the house.”

“Here?”

“Yeah, Beanie.” He shifted his gaze back to her. “Here.”

More to grasp. Harris was dead, and Cal – her husband, she thought, had betrayed her. She couldn’t bring herself to look at Gus. “When? For how long?”

“I don’t know. I first noticed about eight months ago. It was obvious you two weren’t going to make it.”

She felt heat rise into her face, embarrassment and anger boiling up in her. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I didn’t want to stick myself between the two of you.”

“Why tell me now?”

“Because I don’t like what’s going on around here, and I figured it’s time to get everything out on the table. Doesn’t matter if it has anything to do with Harris’s death or the attack on Mackenzie and that other hiker last week.”

“They were both knifed,” Bernadette said, almost to herself. “Like Harris.”

“I’m not saying Cal had anything to do with the attacks.”

She nodded, more in control of herself now. Of course Cal had women, especially in the past year. And of course he would have them here, at the lake.

She faced Gus. “Did Mackenzie know about Cal’s women?”

Gus scratched the side of his mouth, as close as he would get to displaying any discomfort. “She caught him just before she headed to Washington. It’s eaten at her. She was in the same pickle I was. She didn’t know what to do.”

Bernadette stiffened. “I’ve been played for a fool.”

Gus sighed. “No one wanted to see you hurt.”

“How was your silence supposed to change the facts? Cal took women here, to the one place he knows it would hurt me most for him -” She didn’t finish, just crossed her arms tightly across her chest and faced the water. “Well. You can see why we didn’t make it. And don’t stand there and tell me you told me so.”

“I didn’t say a thing.”

“You didn’t have to. I know you, Gus.” The wind blew her hair into her eyes, and she pushed it back. “I’ve arrived safe and sound, and you’ve delivered your news. You can leave now.”

He started off the dock. “I’ll get my gear and sleep on the couch tonight.”

“You will not.”

He ignored her. “I’ll be back here in an hour.”

Bernadette couldn’t focus her thoughts enough to come up with an argument against his plan, and by the time she started to say something, he’d walked back up to his truck. She ran to the yard and looked for something to hurl into the lake. An Adirondack chair was too big. She picked up a rock the size of a golf ball and threw it as far as she could, watched it plop into the water, then found another and heaved it.

She hadn’t loved Cal in a long time, but she couldn’t believe he’d want his affairs to get out into the open. Even if he wouldn’t mind humiliating her, he’d resist because of the likely backlash against him. He’d been extra difficult, tense and preoccupied for weeks. She’d blamed their divorce, the stress over his move.

“Wasn’t that stupid,” she said aloud, flopping into one of her Adirondack chairs. She could smell old ashes in the stone fireplace. Had Cal and his women sat out here, toasting marshmallows?

How the hell could she have been so naive? So damn blind?

Harris’s death – his murder – would put both her and Cal under greater scrutiny by the police, the media, their colleagues, the public. There’d be an investigation; with any luck, an arrest; then a trial, a conviction. The whole sordid, horrible ordeal would go on and on.

The wind was uncomfortably strong, and she needed a sweater, but Bernadette stayed where she was, running through the litany of choices she’d made in her fifty-seven years that had led her to this point.

A car sounded in her driveway, and when she looked up and recognized the two men walking toward her as local FBI agents, she knew they were there to talk to her about Harris. About the rooming house.

About Cal?

But she had done nothing to wrong and she had nothing to hide, never mind that a similar attitude had landed more than one defendant in her courtroom.

Bernadette rose, smiling as she walked up to greet the two men. “I assume you’re here because of Judge Mayer’s murder. I just heard. Please, come inside.”

She led them onto her screened porch and began to answer all their questions.