Buried Truth (9 page)

They didn’t speak anymore until they got back into the relative cool of the cabin. Egan and Margot sat on the couch and accepted glasses of iced tea. Bill stood, arms folded across his chest.

“So what brought you by here, Dr. Egan?” Heather said after she put out water bowls for the two dogs.

“I got your message about the fossil find and my curiosity was piqued. That’s part of the thing I love about this area. The paleontological history is stunning. The Badlands are known for their abundance of fossil mammals, but there’s a good quantity of nonmammalian and plant fossils, as well.” He smiled. “Sorry. I get carried away sometimes. Anyway, I called Jean’s place to see if you were still there.”

Bill felt a scowl form on his face at the familiar use of his aunt’s name. He stared at Egan intently. “Haven’t seen you at Aunt Jean’s since I’ve been back.”

Egan seemed to come to some decision. He squared his shoulders. “You made it clear that you don’t want me around your aunt, Bill.”

Bill stared at him. “You know why I feel that way.”

“As I said before, I had only suspicions that your sister was using drugs when she worked for me. If I had had proof—seen her shooting up, let’s say—I would have come to you, but families are complicated and I wasn’t sure it was right to go to her brother with suspicions.”

Bill’s eyes flickered and he looked away momentarily. A suspicion might have been enough for him to save her life. But, situation reversed, would he have intervened if it had been Egan’s sister? A man he hardly knew? He shook his head. “That’s in the past.”

Though he did not make eye contact, he felt the doctor’s gaze on him.

“I think maybe it’s not,” Egan said softly. He drained the glass of tea as the phone rang.

Bill and Heather exchanged a dark look. “Let it ring,” he mouthed to her. If it was Oscar, he didn’t want to confirm that Heather was home. Perhaps Oscar might think that Heather
had flown out of town. He didn’t believe it was likely, but the guy had to make a miscalculation sometime.

An angry voice poured through the answering-machine speaker. “Fernandes, someone hacked into our site using your password. You can see the results for yourself. I’m giving you ten minutes to see before I take it down.” There was muffled swearing on the answering machine. “Get me a real story by tomorrow night, and I’m not kidding around. Mr. Brown left a message for you to come see him tomorrow. Write that one up if you want, but get me something.”

Heather finally made it to the phone just as the “end of message” tone sounded. “What in the world is he talking about?”

Bill gestured to her laptop, a feeling of dread in his gut. “The online site for the
Blaze.
Pull it up.”

They all crowded around Heather as she booted up the computer and accessed the website. The story materialized in a moment.

No title, the font larger than the rest of the site.

H
e heard Heather gasp as she read her own name on the byline. She looked at him, eyes round with horror. “Bill … I never …”

He squeezed her shoulder. “I know. Oscar hacked into the system. Your editor will take it down soon.”

Margot’s voice jerked him from his reverie. “Is this the man who is stalking you?”

Egan whistled. “If he’s able to hack into your work system, who knows what else he can do?”

Heather groaned. “I’m going to lose my job.”

He wanted to hold her, to apologize for jeopardizing her work, but she was up and pacing.

“I’ve got to get my editor a story.”

“The fossils—” Egan suggested.

Bill cut him off. “No. No one is crawling around my aunt’s property until this thing with Oscar is resolved.”

Heather mumbled to herself. “It will have to be Mr. Brown’s story. I’ll write up the uranium thing tomorrow. Take some pictures. It will buy me some time.”

Margot cocked her head. “Uranium? That’s my field. I can help you. Take readings, if I can find the equipment.”

Heather’s face was awash in disbelief. A little girl’s face peeked out of the woman’s, tender and vulnerable. Seeing
that look on her face was almost too much for him. Though he wanted to tell Heather to forget it, to stay inside and let things slide until Oscar was brought down, he would not sever the delicate thread that bound mother and daughter at that moment.

Heather was still gaping at her mother when Egan spoke up. “I can lend you the equipment. I’ll bring it tomorrow.”

Heather alternately went pale and then flushed pink. “Oh … okay. Tomorrow, then.”

Egan walked to the door. He turned to Bill before he left. “I really did like your sister very much, Mr. Cloudman. I was trying to help her by getting her that janitorial job at the lab. I wonder every day if I made a mistake not telling you about my suspicions.”

Bill nodded slightly. The thought came from the dark place inside.
Yes, you did and you won’t find forgiveness here.

Margot was fingering the top of her cane. “It’s settled, then. We’ll go tomorrow and see if we can get you a story. I think I’ll lie down for a while now.” She got up and limped down the hall.

Egan left, closing the door softly behind him.

Heather stood with a dazed expression on her face. “She offered to help. She knows it’s a rag magazine, a trash paper.”

He felt his heart fill. “And she knows it’s important to you.”

Heather’s eyes brimmed and she bit her lip. “But she doesn’t care. She never cared. She left me and Dad.”

Before he realized it, he had her in his arms and he was caressing her back, his lips brushing across her hair, inhaling the subtle scent of her. “People do terrible things, Heather, even to the ones they love.”

“This is too much,” Heather cried into his chest. “I don’t know what to think or feel.”

He sighed, enjoying her softness. “I can’t give you any advice there. I’m no good at the tender stuff.”

She pulled away and looked at him, a tear glistening in each eye. “You used to be before… .”

He put her gently away from him as reality once again seeped in. “Everything changed for me, Heather. Now I’ve only got anger left. That’s a good thing, in one way.”

Her face was pained. “How?”

“Because I’m going to use every ounce of that rage to bring down Oscar Birch once and for all. He’s not going to hurt you or anyone else ever again.” He walked to the door, missing the feel of her in his arms. “I’ll be back tomorrow. Don’t go anywhere until I’m with you.”

He called to Tank and hastened out the door, anxious to leave before those tears left a sad trail down her cheeks.

Heather made omelets for dinner and she and her mother sat at the same banged-up wooden table they had when she was a child. They both ate little. The conversation was strained to the point of being painful.

Finally Heather said, “You don’t have to help with the story.”

Her mother looked at her gravely. “I know. I want to.”

“Why?” Heather blurted out, the need to know overwhelming her anger. “Why? After all these years?”

Her mother put down the fork. “What you really want to know is why I left, isn’t it? How I could turn my back on you?”

Heather looked at her plate, suddenly terrified to hear the next words out of her mother’s mouth. She wanted to run from the table, but she was rooted to the spot.

“I am and have always been a driven person. I wanted to be a geologist like my father from the time I was a child. I never knew my mother, so I don’t know how many of my traits came
from her. I planned out my life, my degrees, my work at the university, and it went exactly as I envisioned until I met your father.” She sighed softly. “He was doing construction on the college where I was a professor. We were totally wrong for each other, complete opposites, and I loved him instantly.”

Heather nodded. Her father had said as much in the rare moments when he shared at all, but it was strange listening to her mother talking about something as intimate as their love story.

“We married with the understanding that we would never have children, because I didn’t want any.”

Heather winced, afraid to look her mother in the eye. “But I came along.”

“Yes, and I had a stroke shortly before delivering you. I am not sure which was more overwhelming to me, the stroke or being a mother. Both seemed to me like punishments.”

“Punishments?” Heather wanted to sweep the plates from the table. “I was a punishment to you? Most people love their children, think of them as blessings.”

Margot held up a hand. “The only thing you have always been able to count on from me is honesty. That is how I felt. I was overwhelmed and underequipped to deal with both situations. The stroke left me unable to do my work at the university, so when you were six your father brought us here. He thought the environment, being away, would help. It didn’t. I felt more isolated, further removed from myself and my goals than I ever had before.”

Heather felt the tears flow, in spite of her effort to control them. “I couldn’t help being born. God didn’t send me here to punish you.”

Margot’s voice grew soft. “I know that now, but I had no idea how to be a mother. In the end, I decided that I had no business continuing in a role I was unable to fill. I was sure you’d be fine without me.”

The words dropped like bombs in the quiet of the kitchen. “Fine?” She almost choked on the words. “I’m not fine. I’m a recovering alcoholic, Mother. Did you know that? No, I guess you didn’t. You never bothered to check in.”

“Actually, I did. Several years ago I contacted your father and asked him about you. He told me about your struggles. I asked him not to tell you I called.”

Heather ignored her own surprise. “You must have been so disappointed to find out about me. I used to be a respected writer until I messed up so badly I got fired.”

Margot shifted, and for a moment Heather thought she was going to touch her, but her hand remained suspended in the air. “No, your father told me how you picked yourself up and faced it, how your God helped you get through it.” Her eyes flickered. “That was more than I ever had the courage to do.”

A myriad of thoughts and memories swept through Heather until she found herself unable to speak at all.

Her mother got to her feet. “I don’t know if I’ve made things better or worse between us, but I hope I have not added to your pain. Good night, Heather.” She shuffled down the hall and quietly closed the bedroom door.

Heather let the emotions shudder through her until she found herself on her knees, Choo Choo licking her face.

God, show me how I’m supposed to feel.

She’d been a punishment to her mother, a crippling weight around her neck, yet there was a hint of something else in the words. Pride? A shadow of love?

You picked yourself up and faced it,
her mother had said.

And she’d cared enough to keep tabs on Heather’s recovery.

But not enough to come back.

That was the excruciating truth of the matter. Her mother had never felt enough for her daughter to come back.

Heather cried until there were no more tears left. Unable to sleep yet unwilling to continue brooding on her relationship with the woman in the next room, Heather wiped her eyes and sat again at her laptop. Her gaze fastened on the calendar hanging on the wall.

September first loomed just a scant five days away.

There must be something, anything she could do to help catch Oscar before he killed Bill. Fingers cold, she pulled up the
Blaze
website, relieved to find that the hideous obituary was gone and no more rants from Oscar added in its place. The passwords had been changed, security shored up, she imagined, as much as the run-down, cash-strapped newspaper could manage.

She should be researching the uranium angle. It was the most serious topic her editor had allowed her to cover. Mr. Brown believed his well was contaminated by a nearby uranium pit, but the man was known to complain about everything, from kids hanging out on his sprawling property to cars on the once-empty streets since the DUSEL had moved in. In spite of the time, she risked placing a call to him, leaving a message that she would be there the following morning. She went to pull up her notes, but a sense of urgency took her in another direction as the clock chimed ten.

It was almost Saturday. If Oscar was serious about his deadline, Bill had only four more days to live. Controlling the tremor that rolled down her spine, Heather typed Oscar’s name in the search box and began to sift through the bits and pieces of his life.

There was not much to learn. Oscar, Autie and Hazel, a former Eagle Rock resident, lived in a small place outside town. Oscar kept to himself, according to the few people who came into contact with him. One report from a shop owner said he noticed bruises on Hazel Birch when she came into
the store to buy groceries. Hazel’s explanation was that she’d tripped and fallen.

Autie was homeschooled, apparently. He and his father would venture into town infrequently, once arriving to enter and win a shooting contest. Oscar’s quote to the paper after winning was “My shooting speaks for itself.”

She bit her lip. Is that how it would end for Bill? One quick shot out of nowhere? No, Oscar had made it clear in his last message. Oscar would be face-to-face with Bill at that awful moment. She remembered the coldness in Bill’s eyes that belied his warm embrace.

Now I’ve only got anger left,
he’d said.

She was a part of it. If she hadn’t run, would he have been able to hang on to some tender emotions?

She pushed away the thoughts and pulled up another article describing what authorities believed had happened to Hazel. It had occurred in mid-September, and although Heather had been in Rockvale at the time, she’d been far too preoccupied with trying to hide her own addiction from Bill to remember the details.

Hazel’s body was found on the Eagle Rock reservation, not far from Aunt Jean’s place. She was shot with a gun later found in Oscar’s possession. Her abandoned car was discovered by Al Crow in a nearby ditch with the keys in the ignition, leading police to believe that she’d been driven off the road. In a panic she’d tried to flee on foot when Oscar caught up with her. There was a picture of the abandoned car, door open, a tube of lipstick lying on the ground.

Heather tried to imagine what Hazel’s frantic flight must have been like. Something made her fear for her life, so she ran, grabbing a few dollars maybe and her phone if Oscar allowed her to have one. What would it be like to leave behind any kind of safety, any means of support? Heather had done something similar when she’d fled to Miami, but she’d had
the love of her father and a small amount of money to keep body and soul together.

After the murder, Oscar fled, escaping capture until he was cornered by Bill and Johnny a month later, just after Heather left town. Finally captured by the FBI, Oscar was remanded to jail, pending his trial at the federal courthouse.

But the jail hadn’t held him, Heather thought. Not after his son was killed.

She glanced at the clock, now showing almost 1:00 a.m. Her eyes burned with fatigue. What had she learned that might help Bill? Nothing.

The relentless ticking of the clock followed her down the hallway as she made her way to bed.