Dead Silver

22

That got my thoughts spinning in a very different direction from where they'd been most of the day.

Of course, that crush was a long time ago. Renee was barely a teenager then.

I headed into the kitchen to clean up. It wasn't much of a job; she was a tidy housekeeper, and there were only the dinner dishes.

The more I learned about her and the circumstances surrounding the murders, the more I sympathized with her psychological quagmire. Now I was starting to see the heavy burden of guilt she must be carrying. She'd never had a chance to talk to her father about the event that had ruined his life. No doubt she'd harbored resentment and jealousy toward Astrid, the interloper who'd stolen him away, broken up their family and home-and was closer in age to Renee than to him. Then came the nightmarish crime itself, probably bringing the irrational fear that her anger was somehow to blame.

All that was seething beneath the surface, along with the tangible troubles crowding in on her. She was holding up a hell of a lot better than I would have.

As I finished up in the kitchen, drying the dishes and swabbing the counters, I was aware of the sound of the shower running upstairs. Then that ceased, and the old house was quiet.

Until I heard Renee's voice say, "Ohhhhh"-almost a groan, faint and far away but still conveying horror.

I went up the stairs three at a time and ran to her open bedroom door. She was wearing a bathrobe, her hair damp-backed up against a wall, arms drawn tight against her chest and fists clenched, staring at her open lingerie drawer.

Inside it was a dark bristly mass that looked loathsome even from fifteen feet away-a big pack rat, shot through the body.

I pulled the quilt off the bed and wrapped it around Renee, then held her for a minute, trying to calm her shivering and my rage. There was no doubt in my mind that this was the work of Ward Ackerman. I hadn't even thought about him still having a key to this place, but of course he would. Maybe he'd killed the rat somewhere else, maybe in the woods right here; after living in this house for years, he'd know where their dens were. In fact, he was probably on a first-name basis with them.

The only time he could have done it was while we were in Phosphor. I wondered if he'd just been driving around and realized we were gone, or if he'd been watching more actively. The Ackerman clan certainly might own an SUV like I'd seen up on the overlook earlier today.

Or maybe it was Boone who was watching.

The corpse had leaked blood and fluids on some of the garments; others might have been salvageable.

"You want to keep any of this?" I said.

"I-couldn't."

That was what I'd figured.

I carried the drawer downstairs, wrapped the rat and garments in a plastic trash bag, and took that out to the garbage cans. Then I just stood there, with my gaze searching the dark, suddenly hostile surroundings.

I had to let the sheriffs handle Ward, and stay out of it myself. I had to.

Back in the kitchen, I scrubbed the drawer out thoroughly with a Brillo pad and dried it with paper towels, making sure there wasn't so much as a hair left from the rodent's hide. I took it back upstairs and fitted it in place.

Renee watched me, sitting on the edge of the bed still huddled in the quilt. It struck me that she had that solemn expression I remembered from when she was a little girl.

"Will you hold me again, just for a minute?" she said.

I was more than happy to.

But the minute stretched longer, and when the holding turned into shy kissing and then went on from there, I swear it wasn't entirely my doing.