If Manny had confided in anyone, it'd be his best friend and fellow PJ. Obviously, Val thought, it wasn't his wife.
Sixteen
Ty tried to concentrate on the scenery as he drove Carine up the notch road, a pass in the mountains with a small lake, a waterfall, a rock-strewn brook, ledges, cliffs and breathtaking views. But it wasn't easy to focus on anything but the tense and distracted woman beside him. She wanted to see the Rancourts. He told her he didn't think it was a good idea. She said, fine, she'd rent a car. She'd take a bus back to Boston and get her own damn car. She'd hike up the ridge to the connecting trail that led down to the Rancourt house.
She wouldn't get Gus to take her, that was for damn sure. Gus didn't like the idea of her going up to the Ran-courts, either. She and Ty had dropped off the embarrassing pictures of Jodie Rancourt with the Cold Ridge police and met Gus for lunch at a village café. Gus didn't get it. Why would Carine want to see the Ran-courts? Why would they want to see her?
But Gus couldn't talk her out of it, and Ty sure as hell couldn't. They tried all through lunch. The café was owned by a couple of ex-hippies who scrawled their daily menu on a chalkboard. Carine had turned over her digital camera and camera bag as well as the memory disk. The police had warned her to expect a visit from the Boston detectives now on their way to New Hampshire to pick up the evidence-they'd want to talk to her, as well as the Rancourts.
Carine had hardly touched her sweet potato chowder. Gus had a bowl, too, but Ty didn't go near it-he had a bacon-lettuce-and-tomato sandwich. He didn't like Carine's lack of appetite. "Flutter kicks'll really kill you if you don't keep up your strength," he told her.
"They kill me, anyway."
"Why are you doing flutter kicks? Why not just take an exercise class in Cambridge? Pilates. Kickboxing. Something like that."
She'd given him a smile that he couldn't quite read. "Maybe I'm training for a triathlon."
"Okay. You've always been fit. You need to do flutter kicks to train for a triathalon?"
"Can't hurt." She seemed evasive. "I have endurance. I don't have a lot of power and speed. I'm working on it, though. You can swim twenty-five meters under water on one breath, right?"
He suspected she was trying to distract herself-or distract him. "It's not something I do every day-"
"How did you do it at all?"
"Willpower."
"I have willpower."
"When it comes to a picture you want. You'll wait around for the wind to blow the right way a lot longer than I ever would. But swimming underwater-nothing's at stake for you if you pop up for another breath. For me, it was a requirement. I had to do it."
"You're saying if you want to be a PJ bad enough, you'll stay under."
"It helps."
"That's a crock. I think it has more to do with lung capacity and efficient strokes."
He grinned. "There's that, too."
But she hadn't smiled back, and he knew the illicit pictures bothered her. She'd liked and trusted Jodie Rancourt and Louis Sanborn, but they'd committed adultery in such a way that she'd become involved. She felt used, tainted.
Gus had shaken his head over his soup. "I thought you'd be out of the fray up here, but now they're all up here with you. The Rancourts, this Gary Turner. Next it'll be Manny Carrera."
Gus was all for outfitting his niece for a three-day hike in the mountains. He even said Ty could go with her, seeing how he was more like a brother to her these days. That was designed, Ty had no doubt, to draw a response from Carine, and it did, just not the one Gus expected. He'd wanted, clearly, a hint about what was going on with the two of them. Instead, she shoved her bowl across the table at him and stormed out of the café.
"I guess 'brother' was a bad choice of word," Gus said, not particularly remorseful. "North?"
"I'm doing the best I can, Gus."
"No, you're not. You're just as scared as she is."
"Doesn't matter. I'll do what I have to do."
"To keep her safe-or to keep Manny Carrera safe? Whose side are you on? His or Carine's?"
Ty had attempted a joke. "I'm on the side of truth and justice," he'd said, but Gus didn't laugh, instead sticking him with the bill.
The access road to the Rancourt property snaked up a fifteen-hundred-foot rise of pitted pavement with one bona fide hairpin turn. It wasn't the sort of location people who lived in the region full-time generally chose for their homes, even if they could afford it. Ty glanced at Carine as he negotiated a relatively straight incline, the hill falling away on her side, the bare-limbed trees offering vistas that seemed almost endless. "We still have time to give this up and take Gus's advice and disappear in the mountains for a few days."
She smiled briefly. "Do you still have a taste for beef jerky? I remember as a kid you'd grab a piece of beef jerky and head up the ridge. You weren't even eight years old. I don't know how you lived."
"I don't know, either but I've got MREs these days. Good stuff."
"Purloined 'meals ready to eat.' Well, I understand they're better than they used to be. The prepackaged camping foods certainly are." She looked out her window, the road twisting again now, evergreens hanging over rock outcroppings. "Once I pass the PJ Physical Abilities and Stamina Test, I'm going to take one of the Appalachian Mountain Club winter camping courses. I think that'd be a challenge."
"Once you pass the what?"
She glanced over at him, a welcome spark in her blue eyes. "The test aspiring PJs take to be accepted into the program."
"Ah. I forgot that's what it's called. Ominous. I just remember running my ass off, nearly drowning a few times, and sweating a lot. Indoc was more of the same, just worse. This explains all the running, swimming and flutter kicks?"
"I'm having fun. I've read up on what you do. All these years with you in and out of my life, and I never really knew much about what a PJ does. Is it true that instructors strap you into a helicopter, blindfold you and throw you in the water to see if you can get out?"
"It's a simulated helicopter."
"Real water."
"I remember," he said.
"You got out?"
He smiled. "I'm a PJ, right? I got out."
She sighed, staring back out her window, the distraction of PJ talk not lasting. "I shouldn't have gotten mad at Gus. He's just trying to help. He doesn't want to see me making the same mistakes all over again with you."
"Maybe, but he was also trying to make you mad. Get your blood up. Put some color in your cheeks."
"Well, it worked."
"You're lucky Gus hasn't locked you in your room by now."
Her vivid eyes stood out against her pale skin. "You taught me how to go out a window on a bedsheet."
"As if you needed teaching."
"It's the age difference. It was more telling when we were six and ten. Now-" She turned back to her window as they passed a steep, eroded embankment. "Never mind."
Ty could see she was preoccupied, dreading her visit with the Rancourts. "I can turn back."
She shook her head. "I need to do this."
He downshifted, taking the last section of hill before the road dead-ended at the Rancourt driveway and the start of the trail that merged with the main Cold Ridge trail. A wild turkey wandered into the road in front of them, and he stopped while it stood sentry for a dozen other turkeys that meandered out from the woods. Carine sat forward with a gasp of excitement, as if she'd never seen a wild turkey before. "Look at them! I wish I had my camera." She bit down on her lower lip, then added, reality intruding, "My Nikon."
Ty couldn't stand another second of seeing her so shattered by her experience in Boston, finding Louis Sanborn dead, running into Manny and now finding the four pictures that had appeared on her camera disk. "Ah, hell." He gripped the wheel, damn near stalling out. "Carine, I'm sorry. I don't know what else to say. If I'd just married you-"
"Don't, Ty." Her voice was surprisingly gentle, more so than he deserved. "It doesn't help. Something worse might have happened if we'd gone through with the wedding. We don't know. We could have been robbed and killed on our honeymoon."