Chevy Stevens - Always Watching

Robbie continued. “You were right. Willow and me, we were more than friends.” His face flushed. “Guess you could say she was the first woman I really cared about—last one too….” He drifted off, swallowed hard a few times. “She was from Alberta.” So I’d remembered that part right. It wasn’t much consolation. “Her parents were dead, and she was being raised by an uncle and an aunt, but I got the feeling her uncle was trying to mess around with her, so she ran away.”

“Do you know if she really left the commune?”

He glanced at both ends of the trestle, then looked at Brew, like it was easier to talk to him.

“We met at the beach by Mason’s Store. I flirted with her and told her to come back to the commune, that we had good weed. So she left her friends and climbed in the truck…. She trusted me.”

I held my breath, sensing what Robbie was telling me was taking all his courage, and that one movement on my part could stop his flow, maybe forever.

“But I screwed up. I let her down.”

When he’d paused for a long time, I whispered, “What happened to her?”

“He buried her.” Robbie met my gaze, and the torment in his eyes broke my heart. He looked away, blinking hard and clearing his throat.

My blood was pulsing loud in my ears. Everything else seemed distant and muffled. The river a dull hum. “She’s dead?”

He nodded. “Aaron wanted her vest. She wouldn’t give it up—I told her it wasn’t worth pissing him off over. He was already angry at her for arguing about spiking trees. I’d warned her that he’d use it as a way to make her leave.” A bitter laugh. “I thought that was the worst that could happen.”

I remembered following Robbie and Willow down to the river after she’d disagreed with Aaron, wondering what they’d been talking about. Now I knew.

Robbie continued. “She’d told him he wasn’t the only person who could help people. He hated that. We’d had a fight the next day too, because she’d decided she was sick of Aaron’s crap, and she wanted to leave anyway. She wanted me to go with her, but I wouldn’t, not without you and Mom.”

As Robbie paused, I wondered why Mom finally did leave. Was it really because of social services, and to give her marriage another try? Or had she actually been afraid of Aaron? Was that why my father showed up with a gun?

He started talking again. “Willow said she was going to take you with her. She wouldn’t say why, just that you weren’t safe there.”

I was stunned. I thought about how young Willow had been, only seventeen, and I was touched and saddened by her courage.

Robbie was still talking. “I told her I’d call the cops and report her as a runaway. She was pissed off, said she expected better from me. That’s when I got mad and told her she wasn’t as smart as she thought, and I walked away. I looked back from the road and saw Aaron go after her, but I didn’t follow….”

I held my hand over my mouth, waiting for the rest of the horrible story.

“I thought he’d talk some sense into her.” His voice was strangled with emotion. He paused, caught his breath. After a moment, he continued. “Later, I’d cooled off and felt bad. I thought maybe she was right—we should try to leave with you. When I came back, everyone was still on the reflection walk, and I couldn’t find Willow. Then I walked around to where we’d been digging…”

“Oh no. The outhouses…” I remembered now. The men had been digging holes behind the new cabins. That’s what Aaron had been working on that day.

He nodded. “One of the holes was filled back up. I grabbed the shovel and dug as fast as I could, got down to one of those forty-five-gallon drums we’d used for paint…. I pried off the lid, and I could just see the top of her head.”

Tears streamed down my cheeks. Robbie was staring at Brew, his face expressionless, like he had to disconnect from his words to be able to speak them.

“I tried to feel her pulse. But she was already cold, and there was blood in her hair—” Robbie’s voice broke, his shoulders stiff and his neck tight with the effort to rein in his emotions. “Her nails were torn and her fingers all bloody. The back of the lid, it was scratched. He must’ve hit her, with the shovel or something, to stun her, but she was still conscious when he put her in there.”

“My God.”

Robbie was talking fast now, trying to get it all out. The horrible truth finally bursting free. “I was going to call for help, but none of you were back yet, then Aaron came around the corner. I told him I was going to the cops. He said if I broke up the group, he’d have to punish me by taking away something that I loved. I knew he meant he’d hurt you or Mom. He said he didn’t want to do it, but that the Light would make him, like it had with Willow. It was her fault she died because she wouldn’t give him her vest. He had to protect the family.”

It hadn’t been about the vest. He wanted her gone.

Robbie said, “I told him he’d killed her. And he said no, he’d come back to release her.”

He came back to release her. I couldn’t have known this story, but it seemed familiar, a hard knot of dread and fear in the pit of my stomach. I ran my mind over the words but couldn’t think of when I would have heard them before.

Robbie was shaking his head, his hands fists on the railing. “He was so sick. You could tell he actually believed it—that it wasn’t his fault that she died.”

I had no problem believing he’d convinced himself he wasn’t responsible for her death.

“What did you do with her?”

“He made me put the lid back on the barrel, then we filled the hole, and he made me dig a new one for the outhouse. I sat in the woods all that night, watching over her grave, just kept hoping that it was a crazy nightmare. She’s still there. I go there sometimes and tell her I’m sorry….” He drifted off.

I said, “What are you going to do? We can’t leave her there any longer.”

“I know.” He shook his head, a quick angry motion. “I was worried about him coming after you—he stops by every couple of years, letting me know he’s keeping an eye on you, so I won’t say anything.” That’s why Aaron had let Robbie walk around for decades with this knowledge. He’d used me as the threat.

“Is that why you told me that you saw her hitchhiking down the road?”

He nodded. “I wanted you to drop it. But you’re already in danger now, and getting him arrested is the only way to keep him away from you and Lisa. I’ll talk to the cops.” He searched his pocket again for phantom cigarettes. Brew looked at him with concern, his nose twitching, sensing the anxiety in the air.

“We can go to the police now. I’ll take you.”

“Okay, let’s do this. But I’ll follow in my truck with Brew.”

As we walked back to our vehicles, we didn’t talk much, but I could feel the first tentacles of healing, a subtle shift. So much made sense now. How he’d changed when we got home, the coil of anger that always simmered in his eyes. Why he’d never let himself get close to another woman.

When we got to the station, we were informed that Corporal Cruikshank was out and wouldn’t be back for about an hour. The officer on duty said it would be better if we talked to her as she was already handling the investigation in Shawnigan. Robbie decided to wait at the station. When I said I’d stay with him, he answered, “Nah. I’d rather do this on my own anyway.”

“You sure? I don’t mind waiting.”

He shook his head. “Just go back to Victoria and hang tight.”

I gave him my new Victoria cell number and he agreed to call after he was finished giving his statement. Before heading down to Victoria, I drove back to Mary’s to tell her the news—Aaron’s days as a free man were numbered. When I got there, she was digging in her garden. I stopped near the gate and climbed out. Mary turned at the sound of my car, squinted at me as I walked toward her.