44: Book Two Read online

  “I’ll be up,” I said. “I want to hear everything.”

  After we hung up, I got my blanket and pillow and put them on the sofa. I wasn’t going to take any chances. If I stayed in the living room the front door would wake me. I found an old film noir on Turner Classics called The Killers. Annabelle looked a little like a young Ava Gardner, I thought before slipping into a deep sleep.

  It felt like only a minute had gone by when the front door woke me. I met Kate as she came in with her bags.

  “You did it. You stayed up.”

  “Of course,” I said, yawning and then smiling. I went into the kitchen and made tea while she changed. It was already after one in the morning. The kettle boiled and I poured hot water into two mugs, sliding in decaf Earl Gray teabags, and put them on the table along with some cookies. In a few minutes Kate wandered in, her hair up in a ponytail.

  “Wow, it’s good to be home,” she said. “It’s a long drive back sometimes. That stretch from Warm Springs to Bend goes on forever.”

  She sat down and blew on her tea, cupping it in her hands.

  “Boy, we’re very lucky people. Sometimes you forget.”

  “That’s true,” I said. “We are lucky.”

  Kate seemed a little shaken, but it wasn’t a surprise. She took her investigations seriously and they always affected her.

  “Hey, before we start, how has work been?” she asked.

  “Good,” I said, shoving a cookie in my mouth.

  She was preoccupied so she didn’t pick up on the lie. I wasn’t going to tell her about Annabelle scaring me on the river or about how I had gone down backwards on the Big Eddy.

  “And how’s Ty?” she asked, smiling.

  Kate had been ridiculously happy when I told her I went out to dinner with him.

  “We’re just friends.”

  She nodded. And smiled some more.

  “I just texted Ben to let him know that I made it back okay. He’ll probably drop by in the morning to pick everything up.”

  Kate took a cookie and walked out of the kitchen. She returned with her computer and a large file stuffed full of papers.

  “Oh, Erin says hi,” she said as she pulled out the papers and put them on the kitchen table. “She also says she misses you. She wants you to come visit her in Portland. She says being in a big city would be good for you.”

  After my accident, when I was having all those problems with strangers, I sometimes talked to Erin about how much I hated living in Bend, about how it felt like the walls were closing in around me. She always told me that the world was a big place and not to settle for small things. And if I was unhappy, all I had to do was pick up and go somewhere else, try something different.

  Things were much better now, although I hadn’t had a chance to tell her because she moved last year. We emailed back and forth once in a while, but it wasn’t often. I always really liked that advice she gave me and kept it close to my heart.

  “Okay, ready?” Kate said.

  “Let’s do it,” I said.

  She handed me a large photograph.

  “Here’s a picture of Annabelle Harrison and her husband and son, four months before she disappeared.”

  There was no mistake. It was her. Annabelle was the ghost who was haunting me.

  I stared for a few moments at the photo. It was one of those family portraits taken by a fancy studio, the kind that stamped their signature at the bottom of all the pictures. Annabelle and a light-haired kid were sitting together, her arm draped over his shoulder. A man in a suit stood stiffly behind them. Although they were all smiling, none of them seemed that happy.

  “Jacob is seven there. He’s fifteen now. And that’s her husband, Derek.”

  I ran my fingers over the picture.

  “It was taken in August and she went missing in November.”

  I nodded and then put the picture aside.

  “And here’s her driver’s license. This was in The Oregonian files. I was able to get photocopies of anything I wanted. Erin helped out with that.”

  I held the paper in my hands. My sketch really had been good, looking close to the picture on her license. She had that same, serious expression, that same long dark hair. I read over her stats. She was 5’6 and 135 pounds with green eyes.

  “I wasn’t able to interview her husband. He’s an attorney and was in court all day. But we did talk on the phone and said I could email him with any questions. He seems interested in what I’m doing, although he didn’t have any idea why there would be a Bend connection in her disappearance. He said they had never been to Central Oregon before.”

  “So he’s a nice guy?” I asked.

  I wasn’t picking up on that at all. In fact, as I looked at him and touched him with my fingers, I was picking up on the opposite.

  “I wouldn’t say that. He’s abrupt and cocky but he’s an attorney, so what can you expect.”

  Kate stood up and pulled out her notes.

  “And there’s something else about him.”

  I looked up.

  “He was a suspect,” she said. “No, wait. I mean a person of interest, to be exact. He was never charged and he hired a bigwig firm immediately. But at the time the police were interested in him. I talked with the detectives who had worked the case all those years ago and they said they searched the home several times, but never found anything. And of course, there was no body. Annabelle just vanished into the Portland night and the case went cold.”

  “They found nothing?” I asked. “If he did murder her, he must be good.”

  I thought of all the TV shows Kate loved watching and about how the suspects always left some evidence no matter how hard they tried to clean up after themselves. Between DNA and fingerprints and blood splatters, it seemed almost impossible to get away with murder these days.

  “He specializes in criminal law defense, so he would have an inside track on what to do,” Kate said.

  She looked up from her notes.

  “The detectives each had a different feeling about him. One thought he did it, that he killed his wife and was able to get rid of her body successfully. But the other one thought he was innocent. This was his quote: ‘He’s an asshole, but an innocent asshole.’”

  I nodded as I looked at her son again. Kate sat back down in the chair and finished her tea.

  “You sure didn’t pick a simple ghost, Abby. It’s a complicated case, to say the least.”

  “Yeah, that was my feeling,” I said. “She just seems so angry.”

  “What do you mean so angry?”

  “It’s in her eyes. And in her energy. Mad. Brooding. Impatient. She seems to really want my help, but there’s this crazy intensity to her, too. Like something has happened. I can’t figure it out.”

  Kate put her mug down on the table and looked at me.

  “She hasn’t done anything to you, has she?”

  “No, nothing like that.” I noticed my voice went up a little and hoped she hadn’t picked up on it. “But it’ll be good to help her and move on. I think the most important thing she wants is to be found.”

  “That makes sense,” Kate said. “Her son doesn’t know what happened to her.”

  She handed me another paper.

  “This is the missing person’s report, filed by the husband. He said that she never returned from the supermarket. He called the police at midnight and then came in and filed the paperwork after the required waiting period.”

  I quickly read over it.

  “They thought it was a stranger abduction at first, like maybe a kidnapping-for-ransom scenario. She was driving a nice car and they were prominent in the community.”

  “Ransom? Really?”

  “It’s not like they were super wealthy, but they were doing pretty well. They were well known in political circles. Both were active in the Democratic Party in Portland. Mr. Harrison was up-and-coming and being groomed for office. And Annabelle volunteered at all the local campaigns, rallies, and fundraisers
.

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “So anyway her Audi was found in the store’s parking lot. Nobody remembers seeing her in the market and there’s no record of a purchase.”

  “You said at first they thought that it was an abduction. They don’t think it was anymore?”

  “No,” Kate said. “Not after finding out that she was having an affair.”

  “What?”

  My heart sank.

  “Rumors were that she was having an affair, possibly with one of the other campaign volunteers.”

  “Really?” I said. “Wow.”

  “Harrison finding out about it would give him a good motive,” Kate said. “It would be embarrassing and might even ruin his career.”

  I sat quiet for a few minutes, reading over all the papers and thinking.

  “Is it kind of a letdown?” Kate finally asked, breaking the silence. “Her having the affair?”

  “A little I guess,” I said. “But it doesn’t matter what she did. She didn’t deserve to be killed. It’s all so sad, that’s all.”

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “Of course, Mr. Harrison has his own theory. After the news broke about her affair, he told police that Annabelle left the country with her mysterious boyfriend and they are living it up in Mexico or the Caribbean. And that’s also what he’s told his son.”

  “The bastard,” I said. Now Annabelle’s anger was making sense. “I don’t think she would just leave her son like that.”

  “He told the detectives that she never even wanted to be a mother,” Kate said. She pulled some more pictures out and handed them to me. “The detectives let me copy these. What do you think?”

  I looked through the stack of photos. They were of Annabelle and Jacob. In one shot, she was on the merry-go-round with him when he was a toddler. In another they were building a sand castle on the beach. Another one looked like it was his first day of school. That intensity was gone from her face and her smile was real.

  “I think she loved her son,” I said. “That was wrong to tell him that.”

  “Yeah, seems like that would mess a kid up for life.”

  Kate stacked the papers back into a neat pile.

  “But first things first,” she said. “We’ve got to figure out a way of getting her off the bottom of the Deschutes River. The sheriff’s not going to send in a diver just because you’ve seen a ghost. And I didn’t find anyone in Portland who could ask them to look for her in the river. I need to think on this. We have to find a way, but not so to attract too much attention about knowing that she’s down there.”

  I hadn’t even thought about that. For some reason I was thinking that they would automatically send in the divers once Kate found out who the ghost was. Clearly I had been watching too many movies.

  Kate yawned and stood up, stretching.

  “But no more thinking tonight. Time for bed.”

  She said goodnight. I went through the motions of putting on my PJs and lying between the soft sheets, but there was no way I could fall asleep. I couldn’t turn off my mind. It took hours before I finally drifted off, all the time thinking about Annabelle Harrison and wondering what had really happened to her.

  CHAPTER 31

  I was surprised that I wasn’t tired the next morning. I must have been too excited.

  Dr. Mortimer stopped by to get his stuff, but Kate was in the shower at the time. He seemed disappointed, but didn’t want to wait.

  “She’s not usually that long,” I said.

  “Ah, no,” he said, walking toward the door. “I better just get going. Say hi for me.”

  I walked with him out to his car.

  “How about coming back for a party I’m throwing?”

  “Sure. I’d love to. It’s hard with my schedule, though. Let me know when it is and I’ll try to make it.”

  “It’ll be sometime next month. I’m flexible. If you can email me your schedule, I’ll make sure to have it on your day off. I want you to meet my other friends. It would mean a lot to me.”

  He smiled.

  “Sounds great,” he said, opening the car door.

  I waved as he drove away, pleased with my plan. It would be hard cooking for so many people, but I was already looking forward to it. I figured I’d invite the river guides and the soccer team.

  I went back inside and got ready for work.

  Kate was tagging along because she wanted to see where I thought Annabelle’s body was located in the river. She drove behind me on the Cascades Highway, the road leading up the mountains. We passed Seventh Mountain Resort and turned onto the bumpy dirt road that led down to our take-out spot on the river.

  It was still pretty early and the parking lot was empty. It was nice seeing the river so quiet. Rare, really. It was peaceful when there weren’t hundreds of tourists around. We walked over to the edge of the water.

  “There,” I said. “That’s where I first saw her, floating right above the water.”

  “Man, that must have given you the creeps,” Kate said.

  “Yeah, it did.”

  I paused and then went on.

  “And the second time I saw her she was up there, on that cliff across the river. But she was pointing to the same spot. It’s got to be where she is.”

  Kate pulled her small camera out of her pocket and took some pictures from different angles. Then she stood for a while, staring.

  “It’s terrible, what happened to her,” she said. “You know, I talked to one of her friends in Portland and she is so happy that I’m looking into Annabelle’s disappearance. She said there was no way Annabelle would ever leave her son.”

  “Did you ask her about the affair?”

  “Yeah,” Kate said. “She didn’t know anything about it. But you know, in my book, this mysterious lover should be as much a suspect as the husband.”

  “That’s true,” I said.

  “By the way,” she said. “I think I came up with an idea about how to get the divers out here.”

  “That was fast. How?”

  “We have a photographer over at the newspaper from Hawaii who might be able to help. He’s a scuba diver and goes up to some of the lakes on the weekends. I’m wondering if I can talk him in to going into the river and seeing what’s down there. Maybe taking some pictures. If she’s there, he can show what he has to the police. It could get the ball rolling.”

  “Do you think he’d do it?” I asked.

  “Yeah, I do. Daniel’s different from the usual photographers I have to deal with. He’s got a lot of ambition. I’m going to ask him today.”

  “Sounds like a great idea. Let me know what he says.”

  I looked back over to the spot.

  “Okay. Better get going. Man, this will be a pretty big story if they find her.”

  We walked back up to the cars. We were still the only ones in the dusty lot.

  “Thanks again. For everything.”

  “Don’t be silly,” she said, looking around one more time.

  There was a chill to the morning, but it was beautiful. The birds were singing and the sun was just making its way up. The light was beginning to dissolve the thin mist that hung over the dark water.

  “It’s sure nice out here,” Kate said. “It makes sense why you want to be out here every day.”

  She got in her Subaru and rolled down the window.

  “Bye,” I said. “See you tonight.”

  “Stay safe out there.”

  I got in the Jeep and followed her out to the highway.

  As I drove, I thought of Claire. It was odd, seeing ghosts like we did. There was so much I didn’t understand. Like, how I was able to see them, but not really able to talk to them. It seemed that she talked with spirits all the time. I wondered why it was so different for me.

  And I wondered why I didn’t have any problems talking to Jesse. At least when he had been around. So long ago now.

  CHAPTER 32

  I drove back to the Raft Adventures office, parked, and
waited for the guides to show up before going inside. When everyone arrived, we signed in and drove up to the river.

  I sat next to Ty on the way and listened as he talked about Montana and grizzly bears and about the close call he once had with a mother and her cubs.

  “Hey, by the way, when are we doing another dinner?”

  “I’m kind of busy this next week. I’m helping my sister with something,” I said, knowing I needed to focus on Annabelle. “But how about after that?”

  “All right, I guess,” Ty said. “But I won’t forget and I’m holding you to it.”

  My confidence on the water came back as I paddled and guided my groups through the whitewater all day. And that feeling of peace was back, too. I didn’t see her ghost on any of the runs, and I had the feeling that she was being patient. At least, that’s what I hoped.

  I was doing the best I could to find her and I felt we were close. Annabelle had to understand that. Or not. That was beyond my control.

  When I got home, I was surprised to find Kate out in the backyard. I wandered out after grabbing a soda. She was in the corner, by the trees, in the small little section of dirt. It had been completely overgrown all summer, but now the soil looked new and dark. She was surrounded by empty bags and lots of flowers in little plastic containers.

  “Hey, Kate.”

  She took her ear buds out.

  “Oh, hi, Abby.”

  She stood up and backed away, looking at her work.

  “What do you think?”

  “Nice,” I said. “Kind of late in the season, though, isn’t it?”

  Kate looked at me.

  “Yeah, I guess so. But I was driving home, and thought about how we always planted flowers out here when we were kids.”

  I remembered that it was usually Mom who did all the planting, and Kate and I messed around with the hose.

  “Yeah, we did always have a nice flower garden back here. I haven’t thought about it in a long time,” I said.

  “It is kind of late but they’ll last for a little while. At least through September.”