Still Water (36 page)

She smiled and laid her hand on his arm. “Stay as long as you need to.”

Baxter parked his cruiser at the side of the road a mile from the Littles’ house, and he and Matt got out and walked across the grass to a spot where they could look down on the cove below. It was hot, and the air was close and thick. To the east the horizon was blurred by a dirty haze like the pollution from a thousand factories and the sky bled from blue to an indeterminate dark grey.

“Front coming in,” Baxter observed. “Forecast is for a storm in the next couple of days.” He took out a piece of gum and removed the wrapper. After a while he said, “You think Kate was telling the truth?”

“No, I don’t,” Matt answered, and Baxter just nodded, his own conclusion confirmed.

“How about her husband? You believe him?”

Before he answered Matt thought over what Evan Little had told them about his wife being out the night Bryan had vanished, and the shots he’d heard. The timing tied in with Carl Johnson’s testimony, but Evan Little already knew about that, so he could be lying if he wanted to get back at his wife for cheating on him. But somehow Matt didn’t think so. He might not like Evan Little much, but he believed he was telling the truth and he said so to Baxter.

“About hearing a boat as well?”

“Why would he lie about that?” Matt said. He knew what Baxter was going to ask next, and he wasn’t wrong.

“You think it was Ella’s boat he heard?”

“If it was, there’s no way to prove it.” He met Baxter’s eye, and from the chief’s expression he imagined that they were both experiencing similar feelings.

“This is kind of a strange situation, don’t you think?” Baxter voiced what Matt was thinking. “Ella’s your client, so I don’t expect you to answer this, but I’ll say it anyway. You think she and Kate are somehow involved in this together?”

“You’re right, I can’t answer that.”

“Aside from her being your client, you like her don’t you?”

Matt hesitated, then nodded, though right now, he thought, his feelings weren’t quite so simple. “Let me ask you something, Chief. You and Kate Little…” He left the question unfinished.

Baxter stared out across the cove. “I always felt a little sorry for her. Because of that husband of hers I guess.”

“That’s all?”

Baxter didn’t answer, but then he didn’t have to. Matt sighed wearily, and squatted down in the grass. He picked a piece of grass and shredded it between his fingers, the way he had as a kid.

“How do you think this looks?” Baxter said.

“Like you said, Ella’s my client, Chief.”

“Okay, I’ll talk, you listen. If we’re thinking along the same lines, my guess is you figure that Kate ran into Bryan that night. Maybe deliberately, maybe not. Could be there was some kind of fight, and he got shot. It was probably an accident. Then somehow or other Ella comes into it. Either Kate called her, or she was fishing like she said and she heard a shot and came into the cove to see what it was. She decides to help Kate get rid of the body and she takes it out and dumps it over the channel where Carl saw her. Then later Kate goes back and cleans the house so we wouldn’t know about her and Bryan, and she leaves the keys he gave her behind.”

Matt didn’t say anything for a moment. He picked another stalk of grass. “Let’s say, hypothetically, that what you just said is broadly true. Why did Ella help Kate? If it was some kind of accident, why didn’t she persuade Kate to report it?”

“Maybe they thought no one would believe them. They panicked. Bryan was a sonofabitch, we already know that, and neither Kate nor Ella had any reason to grieve over him.”

“What about Jerrod Gant? What did he see?”

“Maybe he just saw a woman, and he assumed it was Ella. Or he decided it would be better for him if he said that it was.”

Matt stood up. “There’s one problem with all this. Ella is the one that was arrested, she’s the one Gant said he saw. So why didn’t she tell us the truth, or for that matter, why didn’t Kate?”

Baxter frowned, unable to answer. “You know,” he said eventually. “Without Gant this is all nothing. Bryan probably deserved what happened to him if we knew the truth of it.”

Far below them the cove looked placid and still, the water shades of green and blue, reflecting back the trees around the shore. It was strange, Matt thought, how life seemed to come around in a circle. He’d nearly drowned in the cove once, and now all that had stemmed from that time and affected his life seemed to be drawing back to him again. He asked himself how he felt about Ella. What was her involvement in Bryan’s disappearance, and how did that change her in his eyes? He’d dedicated a big chunk of his life to locking up the bad guys. Was Ella going to turn out to be one of them?

“We should get back,” Baxter said.

Matt let the stalk of grass he was holding fall to the ground, and they went back to the cruiser, each of them absorbed with their own unspoken thoughts.

When Matt arrived back at his office there was a message on his machine from Ruth Thorne. She said that her husband Charlie’s roster meant he would be staying on the mainland the following night. Matt had almost forgotten about Ruth, and he’d made no arrangement to have her husband followed to see where he spent the night. He called the ferry company to check what time the island ferry got in, and while he did he thumbed through his diary to see if he could find anyone who might know an investigator in the area. The woman from the ferry company came back on the line and told him what time the ferry arrived on the mainland.

“There’s a return ferry to Lucia at eight,” she added helpfully.

Lucia was the next closest island to St. George on the run and was only around forty minutes away. It occurred to Matt that maybe Charlie Thorne was spending his nights there and not on the mainland, which he figured he ought to check on before he arranged an investigator. He told the woman he was with the police department on St. George and asked her to look at the crew roster.

“Who am I speaking with sir?” she asked.

“Chief Baxter,” he told her.

“Okay, just hold on, Chief.”

She came back in a moment. “Thorne you said? Charles Thorne? He isn’t down to work tomorrow, Chief. You sure you got the right guy?”

“Yeah, look that’s okay,” Matt said. Thanks for your help.” He hung up, wondering if Ruth Thorne had made a mistake.

On the way home from the dock that evening Ella took a detour and parked at the end of a street at the top of the hill above the town. She followed a path along the ridge which took her beneath the overhanging branches of leafy oaks, where the path was swallowed up in the late afternoon gloom. It led eventually to an iron railing around a promontory on the hill where the sea stretched beyond the island, deep blue and still, glittering with bright shards of copper from the lowering sun. To the west a molten path beat down across the water, and the sky at the horizon was infused with a dusky pink glow that was slowly turning orange and violet.

A railing surrounded Sanctuary’s cemetery, where headstones marked the graves of men who had drowned over the years, though their bodies remained buried somewhere deep in the Atlantic. Ella found her father’s headstone, next to that of her infant brother, and kneeling down she plucked the weeds from around the edge of the plot. She stood up and gave way to a flood of memories and emotions. She had idolized him, and she had been everything to him. His daughter, his little mermaid, and the son he’d never had all rolled into one. Scenes,

small insights from her past flickered against the screen of her mind. She immersed herself in them, lacking the will to resist and for a while she was oblivious to the passage of time.

Dusk had fallen when she was alerted by a sound behind her, and she turned quickly, her mind leaping.

Matt followed Ella after she passed him on her way from the docks. When he saw where she was going he thought about waiting for her by her car, but in the end he went after her. As he emerged from beneath the trees he saw her standing in the cemetery, silhouetted against the sea beyond, and for a while he hung back, watching her, trying to figure out what she was thinking and what he felt.

When she heard him and whirled around they faced each other silently for a moment. Her expression betrayed a torrent of emotions, all too fleeting for him to capture. He went to the gate which creaked when he pushed it open.

“I saw you leaving the dock. I was on my way to see you.” His eye fell to the headstone and he read the inscriptions.

“What do you want?” she said coldly.

He recalled that the last time he’d seen her was as he’d emerged from Sally Brewster’s apartment that morning, and as he remembered how she’d turned wordlessly away he wondered what conclusion she’d come to about that. He didn’t attempt to correct her. Instead he looked at her father’s grave and remembered what Anne Laine had told him, and he thought he understood why Ella had hated Bryan enough to keep quiet about what she knew. If that was all she had done. He’d been thinking that maybe Baxter’s theory about what had happened was wrong in one respect. Perhaps it was Ella who’d killed Bryan, not Kate. Whatever had happened, he needed Ella to tell him the truth.

“Why didn’t you tell me about Kate and Bryan?” he asked her. She didn’t appear surprised that he knew and he guessed she must have figured he’d find out sooner or later. “I talked to Jordan Osborne and he told me what happened that night on the dock. What did you think when you saw Bryan beating her up? Did it remind you of your father?”

She seemed surprised, but it quickly turned to anger. “Bryan Roderick was nothing like my father! My dad was worth ten of him!”

“But you must have felt something,” Matt insisted. “Bryan was already a low-life in your eyes, and then you find him beating up on a woman. Osborne told me how you helped her.”

“There’s no crime in that is there?”

“Not in that. But I talked to Kate Little today, Ella. She admitted that she was out on the point the night Bryan disappeared.” He waited to see how she would react and he thought she appeared wary.

“What else did she tell you?”

He ignored her question. “Her husband heard shots about the same time that Carl Johnson did. He also said he heard a boat in the cove.” He wasn’t sure what he expected her to say, but she seemed to be waiting for him to go on, as if she was expecting more. Maybe she thought Kate had already told him everything.

“Were you in the cove that night, Ella?”

“You’re asking me if I killed Bryan and I already told you that I didn’t.”

All along she’d claimed she didn’t kill him, and it still held the ring of truth.

“Maybe you didn’t kill him, but you saw something didn’t you? Did something happen between Kate and Bryan? Did you help her, Ella? Is that what you were doing that night when Carl Johnson saw you? Were you getting rid of the body?”

She stared at him silently. “What would you say if I told you that I was out there, Matt? What if Bryan had attacked Kate that night, and there was an accident? Would you condemn her for that? Would you condemn me?”

“Are you telling me that’s what happened?”

“I’m not saying anything. I’m just echoing what you’re thinking aren’t I? I mean that’s why you’re here isn’t it?” She met his anger with her own. “Life isn’t always the way you want it to be Matt. It isn’t always cut and dried, cause and effect. Sometimes people do things that might not be right, but that doesn’t make them entirely wrong either.”

Matt shook his head. “Dammit Ella, this isn’t some philosophical discussion we’re having. A man is dead and don’t tell me it was an accident or self-defence. People don’t conceal accidents at the bottom of the ocean. We’re talking about murder here. Maybe Bryan Roderick wasn’t a terrific citizen. Maybe he was the kind of guy who reminds you of something you pick up on your shoe. But he was still a person, and no matter how much of an asshole you or Kate Little thought he was that didn’t give either of you the right to kill him.”

He didn’t know what he’d hoped for, but Ella stared back at him defiant and unrepentant. He felt as if he didn’t know her at all.

“Christ, you must have thought I was an idiot.”

“Is that what you think Matt? Do you think I only wanted to manipulate you?”

“Is there some other way I’m supposed to look at this Ella? You should have trusted me. You should have told me the truth.”

“And should I have trusted you when you said you wanted us to build a life together as well? Is that what you told Sally Brewster too?” Ella retorted scathingly. “And anyway, let’s not forget that I haven’t admitted any of this is true.”

“You’re saying it isn’t? Maybe you’ve forgotten about Jerrod Gant. Right now the police can’t prove anything, but sooner or later he’s going to turn up again. And what happens then?”

Ella stared at him and shook her head. The fight went out of her, and she just appeared spent. “You’re so sure aren’t you? You’re so sure you know all the answers.”

Something about the way she looked at him and the tone of her voice threw him. He had the sudden unsettling notion that somewhere, somehow, he had got all of this completely wrong. Whatever the truth was, it was clear that Ella would tell him nothing more. She started to turn away from him.

“Wait.” He reached out to stop her.

Ella looked at his hand on her arm, then met his eye and held it. “Are you going to let me go?”

Her question seemed to resonate with the possibility of different meanings. He stared at her, but he couldn’t fathom anything of what she was thinking. He no longer knew what to say to reach her. He didn’t know if she was guilty, or if she was, of what exactly, and he hardly knew anymore what he felt about her. In the end he released her. She turned away and he watched her vanish along the path beneath the overhanging trees.

It was almost dark by the time he got home. He needed to think, but he needed to occupy his body and his conscious mind. He changed into shorts and a T-shirt, pulled on his running shoes and began to jog along the track that led through the woods and down to the road. He started slowly, breathing deeply, stretching the muscles in his shoulders and arms as he ran.