The Deepest Water (7 page)

“Could someone from the park area have put a boat out, gone up the finger, and hung out somewhere up there until dark? Then left at the first light?”

Felicia said thoughtfully, “First thing some of us thought of. I asked Pete Holman about it. He gives kayak lessons, you know. The lake’s a good place for beginners, no motorboats, no current, just quiet water. Pete’s usually the last one to leave the lake, he and a student in a separate kayak. He makes them go through one break, up into the finger, then back out through the other narrower break, and he said no one was up in the finger when he left just before dark. He’s the last one out and the first one back in the next morning. He lives over in Bend.”

She poured tea then, and added a little honey to hers. “Try it. Sage honey is very good.”

The detective added a spoon of honey to her own tea and nodded after she sipped it. “Very good, indeed,” she said. “You were a close friend of Jud Vickers’?”

“A good friend, yes. I knew him when he was a little boy, and he used to come over here and play with my kids. Later, he came over to talk, to hang out now and then.”

“Do you know anyone who might have wanted to harm him? To kill him?”

“I never heard anyone talk that way about him. He was liked around here. A good listener, willing to go out of his way to shop for someone in Bend, do little favors.”

“Someone didn’t like him,” Detective Varney said slowly.

Felicia shook her head. “I know what you’ve been hearing about him, and probably most of it’s true enough. He was a chaser, but he never caught anyone who didn’t want catching. They knew what they were getting into with him. You know the story about Coyote and the pretty girl?”

Detective Varney shook her head.

“From one of the books I illustrated,” Felicia said. “They cleaned up the original tale for the kids. It goes like this: Coyote was made up like a hurt little bird, but if you looked hard, you could see it was Coyote, all right. And this pretty girl comes by and sees the bird limping along. She says, ‘You can’t fool me. My grandmother told me about you. Go on about your business.’ Coyote looks at her with a pitiful expression. ‘I’ll die out here in the cold if you don’t warm me under your blanket.’ He shivered and shook and she took pity on him and picked him up and put him under her blanket. And soon, he had his way with her. She screamed and cried, and coyote laughed and said, ‘You knew what I was when you picked me up.’” Felicia smiled gently at the detective. “They all knew what he was, you see, and I don’t think he ever deliberately hurt a person in his life.”

“If some of the women he caught were married, maybe their husbands weren’t happy about his romances,” Varney said.

“Maybe, but no one ever came here saying anything like that to my face.” She considered this for a moment, then said, “I assume that a crime of passion, which would include vengeance and jealousy, I suppose, would be committed during the height of the emotional turmoil, not years afterward. And he’d been seeing Willa Ashford for over two years. A long time to wait when you’re feeling an uncontrollable desire to get revenge.”

“You know her? Willa Ashford?”

“I introduced them,” Felicia said. “Willa was putting together a retrospective of art by local artists, and she was out here several times to discuss it, and select pictures to include. He dropped in one day when she was here and they hit it off just fine. I don’t believe he had eyes for anyone else after that.”

“We’ve heard that he wrote about the people he knew, the residents around the lake. Did anyone mind that he did?”

“Have you read his books?”

Detective Varney shook her head.

“You should. You really should. He used the lake here as the setting, you know. He changed it around, put in a resort instead of these cottages, and added a village down the road a ways, but it was this lake, and some of these people he wrote about. And truthfully, I don’t know if any of them realizes it to this day, or if they do, they don’t recognize themselves. You see, he wrote fiction, but fiction is always derived from experience if it’s any good at all. And his was very good. You really should read his novels.”

“I will,” Varney said. “What other residents were here that weekend?” she asked then.

“Well, I know Doris and Joe Manning were. They’re in the last cottage. And the Beardwells were. He’s a veterinarian in Bend and they come every other weekend when his partner is on call.” She named two others, and dismissed them. “Summer people. That leaves Gary Evans, and I haven’t seen him for months. He’s separated from his wife Virginia, and she comes now and then, but he’s moved up to Washington state, I think. I doubt that she was here. She would have dropped in, I think. I imagine they’re planning to sell the cottage to the state; at least that’s the rumor going around, and she’s been moving stuff out each time she comes. The deal is that we can stay here as long as we want, but if we sell, we have to sell to the state. It’s like a little pocket of individually owned property in the middle of a state park, but that’s the deal we made when the state began buying up all the surrounding area.”

“I noticed that the first cottage is boarded up, empty. Is that what happens when the state acquires the property?”

“Not always. There were nine cottages at one time. One burned to the ground in the sixties and wasn’t rebuilt. The state bought one back around the middle of the seventies and they tore it down. It was a shack to start with, in terrible condition. The old Frazier place that you mentioned is a good building, so I guess they’ll keep it in repair and some day use it for something or other. Teri Frazier drowned in the lake years ago, and Lawrence sold the place a few months later. The rest of us are hanging on.”

“Is the Vickers cabin part of that deal?”

Felicia shook her head. “His place isn’t in the park area. Neither is the Halburtsons’. In fact, Jud said he wanted to buy Halburtson’s place if he ever decided to sell, which he might do. He’s getting too old to be out there on the lake all the time. Eighty! That’s too old to pretend otherwise.”

She caught a glimpse of a fleeting smile that crossed the detective’s face, and she grinned. “Takes one old coot to recognize another one,” she said cheerfully. “I haven’t been out on the lake in ten years. I don’t need to be on the water, just close by. That’s plenty for me.”

“Do you have a boat?”

“No. Sold it after Herbert died.”

The detective’s questions became more and more pointless, Felicia thought. But she answered each one, and yet later, alone again with her dogs, she felt dissatisfied, as if there had been something left out altogether. She nodded to herself. The two overriding motives for murder, as far as she was aware from a lifetime of reading mysteries, and newspaper accounts of crimes, were passion and money. And even if Jud had dumped Doris Manning abruptly, and even if Joe Manning had learned of their affair, that had been several years ago, too long a time for passion still to be a factor.

She didn’t even consider Willa Ashford. Jud had fallen in love with her, and she with him. Of course, Felicia reflected, things could change, but if they had changed, it had to have been within days of his death. The last time Felicia had seen Jud, the Wednesday before he was killed, all he had talked about was Willa, and still with the sense of wonder that had turned him, a middle-aged man, into a boy, with all the world’s marvels spread out at his feet. Felicia had seen Willa’s devastation when her husband died years before, and she had seen her come back to life finally, and then fall in love once more, and she had rejoiced for both her and Jud. Willa was out of the question.

But if he had been killed because of money, then Abby was the first person who came to the fore for motive, and that was ridiculous. She felt about Abby the way she had yearned to feel toward her own children for whom she could never summon the same kind of unquestioning love.

None of her children had been willing, or able, to sit quietly and watch her shape dragons, or monsters, or elves out of clay. None of her own children had ever spontaneously hugged and kissed her, for nothing, just because. Or said she had magic hands. Felicia shook her head in annoyance: if she wasn’t careful she would become another foolish old woman who lived only in the past, one whose life existed in memories. She brought herself back to the here and now, the reality of a murderer.

Even if Abby had the motive, which she didn’t since she cared little about money, she had been at the coast, far out of reach. Not even the police could seriously consider her a suspect. And Brice, according to Florence Halburtson, had been in Portland, so he was ruled out. Lynne, long divorced from Jud, didn’t stand to profit, and she certainly had felt nothing for him for many years, although there had been a time when sheer frustration and misery might have driven her to kill.

Felicia washed the tea cups and pot, and then poured herself a drink of scotch and water. It was after five, she could have a drink now. Herbert never had wanted liquor around the house, never used it himself in any form, and had been disapproving of her occasional drink. She sat at the table in the gathering darkness and watched the last of the boats come ashore, watched as lakeside fires were put out, until only darkness remained. Bits of conversations she and Jud had had over the years flowed through her mind. When she remonstrated him for putting Joe Beardwell in his first novel, he had laughed, had gone to her worktable, a card table in those days, and had picked up her model of the Iceman. The story was about an old man who froze everything he got near, and who kept acquiring more and more property where the sun never shone, the frost never melted. Holding up the figure, Jud had scoffed. “And where did this come from?” It was a caricature of Herbert, but of course Herbert would never have recognized himself in the grotesque little figure.

“An artist,” Jud had said once, “is a person who looks into things, not just at them.”

He had looked into many things, through them, and had written about them. And his words were true. Joe Beardwell had not recognized himself in the novel, and in fact might never have really read it, just skimmed the surface enough to say he had read and enjoyed it.

By the time she realized that Herbert was the Iceman, she had been trapped in a marriage with four children, and later she had been trapped by his need for her. People had believed her to be the dependent one, but that never had been true; he had depended on her for everything, and toward the end, the last six years, as his mind had slipped, his dependency had turned him into a son of a bitch. She thought that Jud was the only person who had ever suspected the truth about her long marriage, described again and again as the ideal, the standard for other couples to strive for. She drained her glass and set it down hard.

Jud had written her and Herbert into his second novel,
The Black Shore
, and Felicia had recognized them. She had wept when she read it, felt anger, embarrassment, humiliation, and finally acceptance of the truth, and even a deeper love and respect for the one person who had seen through the façade of a contented couple, and had been honest enough to tell the truth. But did others come to that point?

Then she was thinking of the new work, the novel he had been finishing when she last saw him. If his death had not been the result of an uncontrollable passion, or simple greed or even an overwhelming need for money, there was a third possibility, she thought then. Fear of exposure. He had seen into and through so many things, and had written about them truthfully. Was there a truth in the new novel that had driven someone to kill him in order to keep secret?

She stood up shakily and groped for the light switch. If the key to his death was in the manuscript, the police would never find it, she thought bleakly. Herbert had looked at the little clay Iceman and said only, “Ugly little critter, isn’t he?” She never knew if Lawrence Frazier had recognized his wife’s death when it appeared in fiction. People saw what they expected to see, what they needed to see, no more than that.

Then she wondered: was the manuscript still in the cabin? Was it intact?

6

For more than an hour neither Abby nor Lieutenant Caldwell said a word as he drove back toward Eugene. It had grown dark, and there was much less traffic now than there had been earlier, but it was still a dangerous road that required attention.

Abby was thinking hard of the implications of someone’s entering Jud’s cabin during the night without being challenged by Spook. And obviously someone had done that. But how? She kept coming back to the question: how had he managed a boat in the dark? Where had he launched it, landed it afterward? Or she. Abby huddled in her jacket, freezing.

“I understand you work in the museum,” Caldwell said finally. “Full time?”

“No. Three mornings a week, usually until noon, occasionally a little later.”

“You going to keep working now?”

She had not even considered what she would do now. “I don’t know.” It was, practically speaking, a non-paying job; she had had a choice, be a T.A., a teaching assistant, or work in the museum, and neither paid even minimum, but it was part of the post-grad program she was in. That and her dissertation. Now she didn’t know why she wanted the doctorate, if she wanted it, what she would do with it afterward.

“Is Willa Ashford your advisor?”

“Yes.”

“Tell me something about her, will you? We haven’t been able to talk to her yet. Someone at the museum said you probably know where she hangs out when she’s not home. Where is she?”

“I don’t know. I haven’t seen her all this week. Except at the service.”

“But she’s your friend, as well as your advisor, isn’t she?”

“Yes,” she said in a low voice.

“Did you and your father have a falling-out because of her?”

She jerked up straighter and shook her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Just another rumor? Someone mentioned that maybe you and your father had a fight a couple of years ago, about the time he started seeing a lot of Willa Ashford. That things hadn’t been patched up yet. Anything to that?”