Healing Stones Page 6

  You know, I wanted to cry out, because it was so dark at my house, in my heart, that I had to get to his light before I lost myself.

  “So—you think something’s happened to him?” I said.

  “Do you?”

  His eyes, small and iron blue, bored a hole through my forehead.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It isn’t like him to leave without saying anything to—anyone.”

  “You know him well then,” he said.

  “Yeah, well, we work together.”

  He waited.

  “We’re friends.”

  He waited some more, but I pressed my lips together. Finally, he pulled a pad and pencil out of his pocket. “His employer has reported him missing,” he said. “When was the last time you saw him?”

  “Thursday night, a little after nine.” I groaned inwardly. It sounded like I’d been rehearsing.

  “And that was where?”

  “Here.”

  He looked at me over the top of the pad.

  “I came to talk to him,” I said. “And then I—left.”

  “And you haven’t seen or heard from him since?”

  I shook my head.

  “Did you expect to?”

  I jerked. My purse slid down my arm, and the blouse dropped to the wet space between us. I took my time picking it up. There was no hurry; I could already feel Detective Updike eyeing it as Exhibit A.

  “Did that come from here?” he said.

  “It was on a hook over there. But it’s mine. I left it Thursday night.”

  I was sure that the only reason the dock did not open and let me drop through was that I was being punished for unforgivable sin. The detective visibly came to all the correct conclusions.

  “I’ll need your address and phone number, Mrs. Costanas,” he said. “We may want to ask you more questions.”

  There was no mistaking the emphasis on the Mrs. I gave him the information and ran like a vandal when he opened the door for me.

  By the next morning, I was still running. I went through the house like a crazy woman that afternoon, cleaning things that had never been dirty—the screws on the door handles, the inside of the dryer. I’d torn through my Zach-fraught dreams all night, trying to find him, locating him in dumpsters and fishing nets and my own downstairs closet. When the kids had, literally, stomped off to school, I raced to Central Market for organic asparagus—all with the chased feeling that someone, something, was after me.

  I couldn’t come up with a plan. Tell Rich about the police, and risk the dropping of the other proverbial shoe? Don’t tell him, and continue to live in nauseating terror that they were going to show up on the doorstep with an arrest warrant? Try to find Zach myself?

  I always stopped there in the frenetic circle of thoughts. When I landed on Zach, on his suffering face that last night aboard The Testament, the pleading in his voice even as he said, “I love you because you’re the kind of woman who will go back to her husband”—when I landed there, the fact that he had left me to face this madness alone distorted it into something I didn’t recognize as Zach.

  I didn’t know where to go from there. It stabbed at me—that there was only one person who could ever help me sort, who could distill any craziness into its inevitable saneness. That was Rich.

  It had been that way from the beginning, in New York, when I was an idealistic theology student at NYU and he was a firefighter with his boots planted firmly on the asphalt.

  “What’s with this?” he’d say to me when I hung up after an angst-ridden phone call with my mother. “Your mother is your mother. All you owe her is your love and your respect. You don’t owe her your way of life.”

  Why, I asked him, hadn’t I come to that conclusion myself?

  “Because you need me, Babe,” he’d said.

  Over and over again. Because it was true.

  The road blurred like foggy glass in front of me as I drove home, a forlorn collection of vegetables in a bag beside me. The only thing that made sense was to go to Rich and lay it out: the scene with the police, the horror at myself that I’d let this happen. No matter what it cost, I needed Rich.

  I always had.

  I blinked back the fog and sat up in the seat. All right. I always did better with a Plan of Action, a POA, as Rich called it. Go back to the house, fix his lunch, make him listen as I told him about this latest knot. At the least he wouldn’t want the trauma of my arrest for the kids. He’d know what to do.

  But I felt the color drain from my face as I approached the house and let the engine slow to a whine.

  A police cruiser was parked in front of our house.

  There was a POA for this, the default every firefighter’s wife fell into when a police official came within a hundred yards of her home. I peeled myself from the seat and somehow made my way through the garage. Rich had been burned. Christopher had wrapped his pickup around a tree. Jayne had tumbled from the stage. Once tragedy has entered a life, there is no end to the things that suddenly become possible.

  I was nearly choking when I got to the great room and found Rich there. With Detective Updike and his sidekick.

  The officer looked so incredibly smug, I wanted to hiss. I managed to dig up my professor voice and the determination not to humiliate my husband any further.

  “Detective Updike,” I said. I nodded at Boy Cop, who still had that ridiculous hand near his service revolver as if I were going to bolt for the kitchen knives.

  They both nodded back. Rich wouldn’t look at me.

  “We were asking your husband some questions about Zachary Archer,” Updike said. “But he ran out of answers.”

  “That’s because this doesn’t have anything to do with him,” I said.

  I crossed to stand beside Rich and felt his urge to step away. His face barely masked the confusion I knew was there.

  “What do you want to know?” I said.

  “After we talked to you at the yacht club yesterday—”

  Rich stiffened.

  “—we looked around—”

  Updike nodded to the officer, who produced a bag. I watched as the cop reached in and pulled out what appeared to be two wet rags. A guttural sound gurgled in my throat.

  “You recognize these, then?” the young officer said.

  Everything in me recoiled as, with an obviously perverse kind of pleasure, he unrolled my bra and camisole.

  “We fished these out of the inlet, under the gate at the yacht club.” His eyes glittered. “I take it they belong to you.”

  “All right, you made your point.” Rich jabbed his chin toward the cop. “You got something to say, say it—or get out.”

  Detective Updike put a hand up to the junior officer and looked at Rich. “We’re almost done here. Mrs. Costanas—these are yours?”

  I clamped my knees together. “Yes,” I said.

  “And how did they end up in the water?”

  “I kicked them in.”

  “You want to explain that?”

  I tried to harden. This man was a jerk, and I hated him. “No, I do not,” I said. “But I will. They fell out of my hands when I was trying to get the gate open, so I shoved them off the dock with my foot. I was upset, and I wanted to get out of there.”

  “Upset because—”

  Rich’s arm twitched against me.

  “Because while I was on board the boat with Mr. Archer, someone came out of the dark and snapped pictures of us. I gathered up my clothes and in the process I knocked over a candle, which set the boat on fire. Zach told me to go, so I ran. And that was the last time I saw him.”

  “So there was someone else on the boat with you two.”

  “Yes, but I don’t know who it was.”

  “So there are photographs of the scene,” the officer said.

  “There were,” Rich said. “I saw them.”

  I wanted to die for him.

  “And where are they now?” the young cop asked.

  “I burned them,” I hear
d myself say.

  Boy Cop looked disappointed, and I wanted to grab his throat.

  “How did you get the pictures?” The detective looked from one of us to the other, like someone choosing between two half-rotten melons.

  “They were delivered to me at the fire station,” Rich said. “I don’t know who and I don’t know why. I brought them straight home and confronted my wife.”

  Boy Cop grunted.

  Rich turned on him. “Would I be upset if something happened to the guy? No. Am I glad he’s disappeared? Yeah. But do I think my wife did anything to the dude—you gotta be kiddin’ me.” Rich dragged his gaze to me. “She’s in love with him, okay? If she knew where he was, she’d probably be with him. Now—you got anything else? ’Cause I gotta tell ya, I’m sick of you bein’ in my house.”

  The detective stood up. “That’s it for now. Mrs. Costanas, don’t leave town.”

  I found my professor voice again. “I wasn’t planning to.”

  “You either,” he said to Rich.

  He started for the door and I followed him, determined that he not spend an unnecessary minute in our home. He stopped, his face now so close to mine I could see the nicotine stains on his teeth.

  “One more question. The secretary at your college—” He consulted his pad. “Sebastian Young. He said you borrowed his master key to get into Archer’s office yesterday.”

  I closed my eyes.

  “What were you looking for?”

  “I wanted to return some books, which I did,” I said.

  “Did you find anything you’d left in there?” Boy Cop asked.

  “Get out!”

  I whipped my head toward Rich. He started across the floor, teeth set into a grind, eyes menacing.

  “I don’t need an escort,” Updike said. He nodded Boy Cop out and followed him.

  When they were gone, I leaned my forehead against the door. I didn’t hear Rich make a move, not even as I turned to him and tried to see him through pained tears.

  “Thank you,” I said.

  “Don’t even start. I did that for our kids. I don’t want them knowing anything about this.” He sucked in a ragged breath. “Do you hear me this time? Don’t tell them anything.”

  “I agree.” The professor voice had been replaced by a thin plea. “I was going to tell you what happened at the yacht club yesterday—”

  “You went back there—and to his office. You said it was over, and then you went looking for him.”

  “To make sure he knows it’s over!”

  “How many more clothes do you have to take off before he’ll be convinced?”

  He stormed up the steps.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  At the moment, Dr. Sullivan Crisp felt almost nothing like a psychologist. And that, he told himself, was exactly what he wanted.

  He’d picked the right place. The beach at Point No Point, the northernmost tip of the peninsula, stretched out before him like an endless playground strewn with oversized toys. It couldn’t be further from the crowded too-adult world.

  Here, the tossed-about driftwood of boys’ forts, built long ago last summer, begged for reconstruction. Smooth rocks littered the sparkle-gray sand, silent to all but the youthfully savvy and sly, who heard their pleas to be skimmed or piled or collected in pockets.

  Sully put his hands on his negligible hips and grinned. God had created a playland of scattered magical pieces for the putting together of puzzles. Here he could forget he was six-foot-two and forty-five years old and in self-imposed exile. He could be twelve, because in the world of twelve, possibilities were endless.

  He jiggled the rocks in his pockets. Yeah. He could lounge in that log hollowed out into a weather-beaten chaise.

  He did. And then he contemplated the pranks that screamed to be played on the plump woman who sat like a Buddha on her blanket a few yards away, reading her book in the cold.

  Sully sagged against the ragged wood. He could do anything except forget why he was there instead of out fixing the world’s psyche, one therapeutic method at a time.

  “Maybe the psychologist needs a psychologist,” he said out loud.

  Buddha Lady glanced up from her book and then back, the way people did when they didn’t want to be caught staring at the— unusual.

  Sully adjusted the purple hat he’d picked up at Made in America, a funky shop down in Hoodsport, the day before. Had this woman never seen a middle-aged man in a tie-dyed ball cap? Maybe it was the scent of geoduck on him that got her attention. He’d just cleaned and marinated one, and she was downwind.

  Or maybe it was merely the fact that he talked to himself. When you were used to bantering with people all day, it was hard to shut up.

  Sully stirred in the log that cradled him like a frog in a hand. How many kites could you fly—how much geoduck could you dig—how much tie-dye could you buy before you were healed enough to go back to the depressed, the bipolar, and the narcissistic, and enjoy yourself again?

  “Holy crow, I can’t even get the Game Show Network up here,” he said, for Buddha Lady’s benefit.

  She gathered up her blanket and her book and picked her way to a spot closer to the lighthouse. As Sully watched her, he saw Ethan Kaye appear at the edge of the bluff and shield his eyes with his hand. Sully could have kissed the man’s L.L.Bean boots. He settled for untangling his long limbs from the chaise lounge log and loping up the sand to meet him.

  It was only early March, but Dr. Kaye looked tanned. He always looked tanned. Probably the contrast of naturally olive skin with snowy white hair, which had been that color twenty-five years ago.

  When Sully reached him, Ethan’s round face smiled into creases Sully didn’t remember, but the eyes were the same. Dark, direct, insightful as X-rays.

  “Don’t they feed you in Colorado?” Ethan said.

  Sully grasped Ethan’s solid hand. “You still look good, old man.”

  “And you’re still the worst liar I ever met.”

  Sully squeezed his arm, clapped his shoulder, nodded repeatedly. What else did you do when you were looking at your mentor for the first time in five years, and seeing that he’d aged ten?

  “How’s Joan?” Sully said. “I forgot to ask you on the phone.”

  “Still an angel,” Ethan said. “She’s on a two-month European tour with her quilting club.”

  Sully grinned. “You didn’t want to get in on that action?”

  “I’d take up knitting if I thought it would help my situation any.”

  Sully tried not to visualize the venerable Ethan Kaye clacking needles.

  “But I can’t even get to Seattle, much less leave the country right now,” Ethan said. “Kevin St. Clair would be behind my desk before I had my seat belt buckled.”

  The creases deepened. Watching Ethan’s face had always been like reading a map of his soul. His was a transparency Sully could only aspire to.

  “How’s that going for you?” Sully said.

  “The same. St. Clair already has three people—all of them men— lined up to interview for Dr. Costanas’s position.”

  “What about the other professor—what was his name?”

  “Archer. We can’t officially replace him until we get his resignation.”

  “Hard to do when you can’t find him.”

  Ethan scowled. “Oh, St. Clair will find him. He’s already reported him as a missing person to the police, not that they weren’t already looking for him when his boat burned up. They’ve been all over the campus.”

  Ethan shook his head. The wind set a shock of hair up at the crown. Though rooster-like, it didn’t disturb his dignity.

  “I have no doubt Archer just took off,” Ethan said. “Left that poor woman to deal with this by herself.”

  Sully peered at him. “So you see her as a victim.”

  “I know it takes two.” Ethan shifted his gaze uncomfortably, and Sully smothered a grin.

  Ethan had always been the soul of propriety. He still referred to w
omen’s forays to the restroom as “going to powder their noses.”

  “So why is she ‘that poor woman’?”

  “Because I guarantee you she wouldn’t have gone where she did without a lot of persuasion. And she’s paying for it.” Ethan moved his eyes from a passing tanker back to Sully. “I told you she needs help. And you admitted on the phone you were getting restless.”

  Sully took off the ball cap, shook it, put it on backwards. “I meant I wanted to get started on my next book, revamp the talk show, open up a clinic in Nashville—not take on a client.”

  “I’m not trying to push you—”

  “Sure you are.”

  “I thought while you were up here regrouping—”

  “I’m regrouped.” Sully rattled the stones in his pockets.

  “I can see that,” Ethan said dryly. He pressed his lips together, eyes searching Sully’s face. “All right, this was a bad idea. You have enough to deal with.”

  “Holy crow—I supposedly still have four more weeks to ‘deal,’ and I’m dealt out.”

  Ethan’s eyes didn’t move. “You were in a pretty serious situation.”

  “Well, yeah—I mean, this is the first patient we’ve ever had commit suicide in the ten years the clinics have been open, but still, we have to look at it from the point of view that ultimately, it was his decision to take his own life. My people did everything they could.”

  “As I understand it, you were right in there with them.”

  “I took it all on at first, but at the end of the day, we have to let it go. Give it to God.”

  “So you’re basically over it.”

  “If a patient gave me a ‘yes’ to that question, I’d say, ‘Thanks for playing, but that is incorrect.’” Sully buzzed from the back of his throat.

  Ethan gave a half laugh. “You still using that game show shtick on your clients?”

  “If something works for me, I stick with it.”

  “I think it’s job security,” Ethan said. “If they aren’t crazy when they come in, they are before you’re finished with them.”

  “You done?”

  “No. You haven’t answered my question. You’re over your patient shooting himself in his car outside one of your clinics?”

  Sully squinted at the tanker, now a misty sliver. He admired Ethan Kaye’s probity. He just didn’t always like it.