The year She Fell (61 page)

What nagged at me was Laura’s suggestion that the accident wasn’t an accident.

There were some cops who believed, just like Freud, that there were no such things as accidents. They assumed every single-car accident was really a suicide, that every accidental overdose was really planned. These cops tended to be cynics and pretty grim about life, but they also tended to be right. Suicide is always suspected when the accident victim is young and single, or old and sick. Not that we share our suspicions with the family— what good would it do? It makes them guilty as well as grief-stricken, and sometimes it screws up the insurance settlement too. Better to say, “He fell asleep at the wheel,” and leave it at that.

So I leafed through Cathy Wakefield’s file, looking for evidence that the investigating officers were thinking suicide. The signs were there, if you knew how to read the reports. The observation about oddity of her rappelling alone in the late afternoon, when the mountains cast deep shadows across the hollows. A tinge of skepticism that an experienced climbing instructor would buckle her harness so wrong that she fell out of it. The mention of her recent return to her mother’s house after two years away.

I went to the storage locker and removed a climbing harness— we had the equipment because sometimes we’d have to help locate a stranded hiker. Then I took the harness and the folder out to my squad car and drove across the river, past the gas station public phone where someone had called in to say a pickup truck was abandoned on the old bridge, up the other side of
Croak
Mountain
. From there, the road wound down, switchback upon switchback, three miles in driving distance, but nine hundred vertical feet from the pine ridge to the river. The river bottom was a place known to every teenager in town because of the little sandy beach, just past the rapids. We used to have parties there, taking the path down beside the bridge, dangerous, yeah, when you were carrying a 24-pack, but seldom lethal.

I parked the car on the gravel shoulder just this side of the bridge, and walked up along the road to the spot where Cathy had hooked her rope. The guardrail was old and dented by collisions, but when I put my hand on it, I could feel scrapes in the warm metal. The gouges were recent and sharp. Climbers either didn’t know that one of their number had died here, or, more likely, took the stories of Cathy’s death as a challenge.

I gripped the guardrail and leaned out over the cliff. I’d done a bit of rappelling myself, for the department here and in
Bristol
. Plus it was part of the curriculum at reform school, you know, all that Outward Bound shit, sending us out in the wilderness so we’d learn survival skills. Mostly what we learned was how to hide our stash of weed from the counselors. But those of us who grew up in the mountains had a healthy respect for heights. I took a deep breath of the cool air, gazing down through the two hundred-foot drop to the
rocky river
below.

The canyon face would have been an easy rappel for an experienced climber, and an easy climb back up. It was the sort of climb Cathy probably did just to pass an hour or two, as another woman might shop in a department store even if she didn’t have much to buy.

But no one died during a shopping trip.

She’d fallen while rappelling down, or while climbing back up, and landed down there on the sand, just beside the river.

I got the folder from the car and sat down on the guardrail, looking through the accident-scene photos. They were sharp and well-framed, probably taken by the photographer at the newspaper.
 
I pulled out a magnifying glass and studied them one by one.

Cops get used to seeing people they know lying dead. In
Bristol
, it was usually our homeless pals, the ones who got themselves arrested every week so they could get a shower and a few decent meals. Then one or the other would be found lying dead in an alley, from heart attacks, mostly, or pneumonia, but sometimes a beating that went on too long. It wasn’t particularly weird seeing them dead. They looked half-dead when they were alive.

It was different, seeing the pictures of Cathy Wakefield’s body. Even splayed out on the little sandy shore, she looked young and fresh and ready in her nylon climbing shorts and tank top. Her eyes were open and her face unmarked. There was no sign of injury, though the autopsy report had listed a fractured skull and a crushed ribcage as causes of death.

Tragic. Waste. Lost.

I spent some time studying the picture of her harness. The leather was unbroken, the buckles intact. But the strap was dangling loosely. A stupid mistake. An amateur mistake.

Or not a mistake.

I pulled my own harness on, fixing the line between my legs and buckling the straps. Hmm. To fall out of the harness- as she must have done, to end up down on the beach without it— she would have had to be dangling almost upside down. Even without the strap tightly buckled, the leg lines would ordinarily keep her solidly in the harness. Unless she was upside down and fell out.

Okay, I’d been known to end up dangling headfirst when I was learning to rappel. But she wasn’t a beginner. She was a professional climber. She wouldn’t make the mistake of neglecting to tighten her strap and then finish up by turning upside down. Unless that’s what she planned.

She was the purposeful sort. Made a goal (like getting her sister’s boyfriend) and went after it. If she wanted to kill herself but spare her family, she’d do it right. She’d make it deniable enough that the small-town cops and the coroner would ignore the evidence and call it an accident.

And that’s what she’d done. Didn’t matter now. Not like I was going to say anything to the family, after so many years. I just needed to know for myself. For Laura.

I squared the photos and started to put them back. But I hesitated, looking once more at the photo on top, of the body laid out in the sand. There was an indentation a yard away from her outstretched hand, just inside the yellow police tape.

When I got back to the office, I took one copy of each photo of the sandy bank and cut out the half with the body. Then I took them down the street to the camera store. Judy was intrigued by my request— usually she just got requests for extra prints of wedding photos, she said— and took an hour off her other work to blow up the images, then scan them and put them on a CD.

When I got back to the office, I spread the blowups on my desk and stuck the CD in my computer. I went through the four pictures, zooming in on that dent in the sand.

It was a shoeprint. And in the middle was a rectangle— a logo.

No one in this town knew more about shoes than Laura. She’d know what that logo was, I’d take a bet on it.
 
I was looking back and forth from the big photo to its counterpart on my computer screen, when Laura came in response to my call.

She looked sweet and pretty, refusing to meet my gaze. I didn’t know if this was an act, playing shy now that we weren’t in bed. Whoever knows with an actress. But I called her over. “Come here. Look at something for me.”

As she approached my desk, I reminded myself this was her sister’s death scene. The photo was cropped, but she might recognize the muddy shore there, that particular bend of the creek. I zoomed in so that all that showed was the shoeprint.

I got up from my chair, and gestured for her to sit down. “There. Look at the footprint.” The rectangle in the middle showed up well, but the logo was blurry. “I figure you know more about shoes than anyone in town—”

“Bass,” she said right away. She hardly had to glance at the image. “A man’s shoe. Probably one of the less-expensive ones, a moccasin, I bet.”

I leaned over her shoulder and studied the image. “How can you tell?”

“Oh, we all used to wear them in high school, no socks. Remember?”

“No. I think I wore the same pair of Adidas running shoes for most of high school.”

She shook her head. “And I still dated you?”

“At least I wore socks.”

Laura frowned at the screen again. “Anyway, it’s definitely Bass. And a moccasin. Probably with a leather thong tie.” She actually looked a bit nostalgic. “They were kind of cute, in a clunky way.”

Our class graduated just a year or so before this photo was taken. “So only teenagers would wear them?” A teenager didn’t fit my preliminary profile.

“Oh, no. They were classics. Still are. Well-made and not very expensive. Sort of, oh, preppy athletic ecological. Easy to walk in.”

Hmm.
 
“Could you hike the mountains in them?”

“I doubt it. They weren’t that rugged, and you can see that the tread isn’t that grippy. No ankle support either. They were more for taking walks around town.”

“So who would wear them? Around here?”

The urgency in my voice must have alerted her, because she stared hard at the image, and when she spoke, her voice trembled a bit. “Someone, I don’t know. Not rich, but not poor. Concerned with image but not, oh, ostentatious. A lawyer on the weekends. A banker. A teacher up at the college. I mean, this isn’t the most trendy town. They go with the traditional.”

Why anyone bothered with psychologists, I couldn’t say. Laura and her shoe analysis trumped any profiler I’d ever known. “Were they sold here in town, back when we were in high school?”

“Sure I bought mine at Mabley’s.”

Mabley’s was an old family-owned shop, still run by the old man who was old back in those days. I wondered how long he kept records. Not this long, I’d bet.

“So why am I looking at this?” Laura asked. “Is it a crime scene?”

Belatedly, I decided to be upfront. Maybe, you know, start a new trend in our relationship. So, gently as I could, I said, “With all these new revelations, I started wondering about your sister’s death. And these are photos of the accident scene.”

She pushed back the chair and started to rise, but fell back. She didn’t seem angry, at least. Anguished, maybe. “Why? What were you wondering about?”

“The police force then wasn’t really well-trained. And there weren’t any accident scene teams nearby, and there’s no sign they called in the state police team. So I thought they might have missed something.”

“Jack—” Laura put her hand on the screen, her fingers touching the photo of the sandy shore. “Look. I know what you mean. And it’s nothing we haven’t all suspected all along. But—”

 
She suspected, and didn’t report it? Or maybe I wasn’t understanding her. “You suspected all along . . . what?”

“You know.” Laura’s face now was wet with tears, but her voice was even. “We always suspected that maybe Cathy—well, brought the accident on herself. At least Ellen and I did, and Mother maybe too.”

I relaxed a little. They’d only been concealing the suspicion of suicide. And yeah, probably it would have helped if they’d shared it, but they wouldn’t be the Wakefields if they could be open and direct. I looked over at the folder which contained all the reports on Cathy’s death. “Yeah. Well, that’s probably what the detective thought too. But there’s no use worrying a family that’s already grieving. So the official verdict was accidental death.”

She was silent for a moment, staring out the window. “It did make it easier. To believe that, or at least to pretend to believe that. But when we learned about—about Brian, we couldn’t help but think that she’d been depressed afterwards. Now we find out that he was the
second
baby she gave away—”

“And this one, Mom didn’t manage to retrieve.”

Laura whispered, “I have thought such a terrible thing about Mother for so long. That she betrayed my father, and Theresa was the result, and she hardly waited for him to be buried before she took Theresa back again. And the truth was . . . more complicated. Maybe worse. Cathy was so young—she couldn’t raise a baby, I know. But Mother taking Theresa back later—it might have seemed like a rebuke. And so Cathy had another child. And if she told Mother about that—Mother could have been so disappointed . . . Cathy was supposed to be the golden girl, you know. The one who always triumphed.” Laura took a deep breath. “Mother might have said something angry. And she could be looking back and feeling guilty—afraid that she drove Cathy to this.”