The rain started as Guy was waiting for Oriana Harrison’s call, now nearly an hour late. He swiveled away from the desk when he heard the first drops and watched as it began sheeting down, turning the world to gray and obscuring his view of the sea. The forecast had said it would continue through tomorrow morning.
The phone shrilled. He caught up the receiver and spoke into it. Dun Harrison.
“I’m here with Oriana,” he said. “She was delayed getting home. I’ll put her on now.”
The voice that hesitantly said his name was low-timbred, cultured, and adult. It surprised him, even though he knew Oriana was now nineteen, because in his focus on the murders he’d fixed her in his mind at age six.
He said, “Thanks for agreeing to talk with me. Your uncle has told you about the book I’m writing?”
“Yes.” Pause. “Do you think you can find out what happened out there?”
“Maybe, with your help. How much do you remember about your life in Cascada Canyon?”
“For a long time I remembered very little. I was only six when I left California, and Nana — my grandmother — encouraged me to forget. But when I was in eleventh grade I had a breakdown and went into therapy for a couple of years. A lot of things came out.”
“Do you mind talking about them?”
“...Not if you think it will help you.”
Go slowly, Guy warned himself. She’s skittish and may bolt the conversation.
“Were they good or bad things?” he asked.
“Both.”
“Let’s talk about the good things first.”
“Well, it was pretty there. We didn’t have to go to school like other kids. My parents taught us a couple of hours a day, and otherwise we went to the beach or swam in a pond on the hill. Heath, Eric, Chryssie, and I had the run of the property; we made up all kinds of games. Heath and I had a great toy room. When the grown-ups had parties we stayed in the kid boxes and told ghost stories before we went to sleep.”
“By ‘kid boxes,’ you mean those bunkhouses?”
“Yes. Uncle Bernhard built them for us.”
Guy jotted Ulrick’s name on a legal pad. Oriana’s tone had changed when she mentioned him. “He wasn’t a real uncle, was he?”
“No, just a friend of my parents.”
“Were you fond of him?”
“At first. It’s complicated.”
“Why?”
Silence. Guy waited it out.
“Excuse me for a minute, please.” He heard her muffled voice speaking to someone in the background, and then a door closed. Asking her uncle to leave so she could talk in private.
“Mr. Newberry?” she said. “We may as well talk about the bad things now. I loved and trusted Bernhard Ulrick. All we kids did. And he paid back that trust by molesting me on at least three occasions. On one occasion, two weeks before the murders, he beat me and said that if I told my parents he’d kill me.”
“Did you tell?”
“No. Heath did. He and Chryssie eavesdropped outside Bernhard’s laboratory that day. He was acting seductive, trying to get me to tell him where the money was — a large amount of cash my mother had hidden somewhere on the property. Heath and Chryssie ran away, making noise. That angered Bernhard, and when I insisted I didn’t know the hiding place, he beat me. He left marks, and I lied to my parents, told them I’d fallen.”
“When did Heath tell them the truth?”
“A week later. He asked me if Bernhard had ever done anything bad to me, and I couldn’t keep it a secret any longer. He went straight to our parents, and my father got in a fistfight with Bernhard and made him leave the canyon that same day.”
Bernhard had left a week before the murders? How could that be?
Guy said, “He came back, though.”
“Never.”
“But he was killed along with the others.”
“No he wasn’t. I saw him afterwards.”
“Where?”
“At the airport when I was boarding the plane to go home with Nana. I looked back and saw him standing in the crowd. He was wearing a hat and had grown a mustache, but he still had a bandage over the cut on his forehead from when he fought with my father. And his eyes: They were terrible. They looked at me like they did when he said not to tell or he’d kill me. I knew he was there to remind me of that. And I never did tell anyone about seeing him or what he’d done to me. Not until I told my therapist, and now you.”
Rho pushed away from her desk, eyes burning. She’d gone over the old casefiles carefully, but nothing in them shed any light on Wayne’s last request that she think about what the missing blood samples might have told them. More wishful thinking on his part than anything else, she supposed.
She put her feet up, closed her eyes. The image that appeared on her lids was of blood, bone, brain matter. Quickly she opened them and stared instead at the blackish window. Listened to the rain whacking down on the substation’s flat roof. Two prisoners in the holding cell were yelling at each other; she wanted to go back and tell them to shut up, but couldn’t summon the energy. Wayne would—
Wayne. Fresh pain stabbed at her. His oldest daughter, Cindy, had come home from her maid’s job at a Westhaven motel just as the body was being removed, and gone into hysterics. Janie, when she arrived, was tearful but resigned. She’d probably realized she’d lost her husband long ago. God knew what was on the tape he’d made for her...
Rho stood, closed the heavy casefile. Wayne was wrong; the answer wasn’t in those missing samples, or anywhere else in the yellowing reports. Better to concentrate on the current case, although she had only this evening to do so. Tomorrow the FBI would arrive in town and take over. Tomorrow she’d feel as much of a failure as she had thirteen years ago.
Guy went over his notes on the conversation with Oriana for a second time, then picked up the photograph taken of her at the airport and studied the child’s expression. What he’d earlier assumed to be anguish was actually fear. He’d missed its import, not being able to easily read children.
Of course, Oriana’s insistence that she’d been looking at Bernhard Ulrick didn’t prove a thing. To a severely traumatized six-year-old, many adults could resemble the one she feared. And as for repressed childhood memory, Guy had followed several cases where the phenomenon had been debunked. False memories could be created out of therapists’ suggestions and adults’ desire to believe.
Still...
He picked up the receiver and dialed Aaron Silber in New York.
The noise from the prisoners in the holding cell was grating on Rho’s nerves. Again she thought about telling them to shut up, again she couldn’t make the effort. After enduring it a few minutes more she decided to take her official vehicle home, go over the list of potential witnesses, select those who looked most promising, and later set out to talk with them.
When she arrived at her house on the ridge, she fed Cody, made herself coffee, and curled up on the sofa with the list and reports on the interviews. Even the portion assigned to her was daunting. As she scanned it, one name after another provoked memories: Nella Samson was her fourth-grade teacher; she’d had her first beer when Doug Scallini stole a six-pack from his parents’ fridge; Harry Vincenzo had taken her to her first dance; she and Alice Worth had tried smoking behind Alice’s father’s barn and nearly set it on fire; old Mrs. York — my God, she was still alive!
Friends, neighbors. Many she hadn’t stayed close to, but she knew their histories, what kind of people they were. And by and large the interviews with them revealed little. They’d seen Chrystal Ackerman and were sorry they hadn’t stopped to help.