John Saul - Black Lightning

A pile that looked familiar to Glen, though he was absolutely sure he hadn’t seen it before, even in the dream.

Now that he thought about it, the familiarity it triggered in his mind didn’t seem recent, but rather like something he remembered from long ago.

He searched his memory, trying to recall when he might have been here before, but found nothing. He’d been to the falls, a few miles upriver by the power plant, plenty of times. Once, years ago, he and Anne had even climbed down the steep trail to the beach below the falls. And they’d probably driven down the road to Fall City a couple of times, too. But they’d never stopped here, he was sure of it.

Standing on the bank, he cast the fly — the one that looked as though it had been made from a scrap of Hector’s feathers and a tuft of Kumquat’s fur — out over the river. Instantly, a trout struck, snatching the fly out of the air so quickly Glen almost missed it. The line started to play out from the reel, and Glen, uncertain what to do next, watched it go. Then, inside his head, he heard the voice:

Reel in!

He twisted the crank on the reel. On the first revolution the bail flipped into place and the line began to rewind onto the spool. Abruptly, it went taut and the rod bent. Then there was a buzzing sound as the force on the line exceeded the tension on the reel and the fine began to pay out again. The voice in his head directing him, Glen began playing the fish.

The game went on for fifteen minutes, and by the time Glen had finally brought the fish close enough to scoop it out of the water and drop it into the canvas creel he’d slung across his chest, he was halfway across the river. Only a few yards away was the cairn he’d seen from the beach just before the fish had struck. His eyes fixing on it, he waded across the river and the narrow beach that fronted it and climbed the bank until he came to the cairn.

Nothing more than a pile of rocks.

But the sense of familiarity was stronger than ever.

One by one he began removing the rocks.

Finally, when he’d pulled several away, the structure lost its stability; half of the mound fell away, the rounded river cobbles tumbling around Glen’s feet.

Something caught his eye. He bent down and picked up a worn pocketknife. Its handle was made from tarnished silver, inlaid with turquoise. Its blade was somewhat rusted, but not so badly that Glen couldn’t open it. Its edge, well-protected by the handle, was still wickedly sharp. Glen gazed at the blade for a long moment, then closed it and dropped the knife into his pocket.

Squatting down, he moved another of the rocks.

Now he could see something else.

A bone.

A long bone. Like the leg bone of a deer.

Except that the moment he saw it, Glen knew it wasn’t the bone of a deer at all. It was a human bone.

He reached out and moved more rocks, exposing more bones.

What should he do? Call the police?

But how would he explain what he’d found? It wasn’t as if he’d simply stumbled across it — he’d had to cross the river, climb the bank, then pull the cairn apart stone by stone.

He stood up, still uncertain. Then, from across the river, he heard Kevin calling him. “Dad! Hey, Dad!”

The boy was still close to the bank, but he was wading into the stream. “Don’t!” Glen yelled. “Stay there!”

Kevin kept coming, wading deeper into the swiftly moving water. “What is it? What did you find?” he called.

Even on Glen the water had come up almost to his waist. On Kevin it would be nearly neck deep. “Don’t come any farther!” Glen yelled. “It isn’t anything! Just a bunch of rocks!” Looking down at the skeleton again, he hesitated for just one more moment, then kicked enough of the stones over it so that it was no longer visible. “Just stay there,” he called to Kevin once more. “I’m on my way back.” Moving quickly, he scrambled back down the bank, crossed the beach and started back across the river. When he came back to the bank where Kevin was now waiting for him, he opened the creel to show him the fish he’d caught. “What do you say?” he asked. “Shall we have it for lunch?”

Kevin eyed the fish warily. “Can’t we just have a hamburger?” he asked.

Glen’s eyes shifted back to the stone cairn on the other side of the river, and suddenly he wanted to be somewhere else, somewhere that didn’t look familiar, that didn’t make strange things happen in his mind. “That’s a good idea,” he said. “Let’s go.”

But as they started back toward the car, Glen felt the strange fog closing around him once more, and heard the voice whispering to him yet again.

An experiment, it said. It will only be an experiment. Use the knife.…

“Maybe this wasn’t such a good idea,” Anne muttered, gazing dejectedly at the plate of uneaten food on the table. Beyond the window, water was cascading over Snoqualmie Falls, but even that magnificent vista had done nothing to lift her spirits.

“You still have to eat,” Mark Blakemoor had told her when he’d suggested they meet here for lunch. “I know you’re upset, and I’m not about to say you shouldn’t be. But you have to eat, and so do I, and we might as well talk over lunch.”

So she’d followed him up the road from the campground to the falls, but so far she’d eaten nothing. Now she gave up entirely on the idea of eating and pushed the plate away. “Edna Kraven,” she sighed. An image of the heavy woman with her shoe-polish hair and the clothes that never quite suited her, came into Anne’s mind, and with it a discomforting recollection of the woman’s hostility as she consistently refused in interview after interview to concede that her eldest son could have been a serial killer. Edna, right up until the end, had maintained her faith in Richard Kraven’s perfection, just as she had maintained the utter contempt she had never failed to display toward her younger son.

Even now, as Anne sat in the dining room of the Salish Lodge with Mark Blakemoor, she remembered Edna’s scornful clucking when she’d been told that Rory Kraven had killed both Shawnelle Davis and Joyce Cottrell. “Well, that’s just ridiculous! Rory couldn’t even talk to a woman, let alone kill one. Now, my Richard — there was a ladies’ man. Of course no one could take the place of his mother. But Rory? Don’t make me laugh — I was his mother, but I believe in being honest. And Rory just wasn’t much of anything. Why, either one of those women could have just barked at Rory, and he’d have run the other way!”

There’d been more — a lot more — but Anne had tuned it out, not simply because she’d heard most of it before, but because she’d tired years ago of listening to Edna Kraven’s version of reality. Anne believed firmly that most, if not all, of Edna’s sons’ problems could be traced directly to their mother, and had she not known better, both of Edna’s sons would have headed her own list of suspects in the woman’s murder. But with both sons already dead … “My God,” she breathed, an idea blooming in her mind. “Mark, what if she knew? What if she knew who killed Rory?”

“Well, I think we can presume she did at the end,” the detective observed.

Anne glared at him. “That’s sick.”

“Cop humor,” Blakemoor replied. “It’s always sick — goes with the job.” Now he, too, pushed his unfinished meal aside. For the last hour he’d been trying to analyze the feelings he’d had when he’d first read the note that arrived in Anne Jeffers’s mail that day. He should have been able to take it in stride, to look at it with the detachment of his years of experience with the Homicide Division.

He should have been able to look at it simply as one more scrap of evidence, one piece of the jigsaw puzzle.