The Deepest Water Read Free Page A

associates share rides. Do you do that?”
    “No,” Brice said stiffly. “Dave Fulton is in Salem, and I would have stopped and picked him up, but I planned to stay over Friday night, and he didn’t. So we drove up separately.”
    “Do you usually stay up there overnight?”
    “That was the first time,” Brice said. “The other times I went I didn’t get home until after two in the morning. We never know when the meetings will end, and no matter when I go to bed, I’m awake by six-thirty. I decided to stay and get some sleep this time since Abby would be gone.”
    “Did you check in at your office here in town before you drove up to Portland?”
    Brice’s impatience was clearly strained almost past endurance. “I already told them. No. Abby didn’t have to go to work until nine, and we lazed about that morning. I left when she did.”
    The lieutenant asked more questions: where he had stayed, the names of his associates, where they had met, had dinner, where he had had breakfast. All things Brice had gone through with the sheriff, all things already in his notebook, Abby felt certain. Brice’s tension was almost palpable; she took his hand and held it. At first he was as stiff and unresponsive as she had been all week, then he squeezed her hand and she could feel his tension ease. They were both like that, she thought fleetingly, coiled so hard and tight that a word, an expression, a breeze might make either of them erupt in some predictable way.
    “Okay,” Caldwell said at last, and turned to Abby. “Mrs. Connors, you want to tell me about Friday?”
    She moistened her lips and released her hand from Brice’s grasp, which had grown increasingly hard. “I was at the coast with friends.”
    He smiled at her. “In just a little more detail, maybe?”
    “Jonelle, Jonelle Saltzman, picked me up when I got off work at about two and we drove out. To Yachats. Emma Olson and Francesca Tremaine came out a little later. We walked around, ate dinner, and talked until very late. On Saturday the deputy came to tell me. Jonelle brought me home.”
    “This is something you do often, go spend the weekend with your pals?”
    “Once a year, sometimes twice.”
    “Who made the reservation?”
    “I did. At the Blue Horizon Cottages.”
    “Why that weekend?”
    “Since Brice would be away, and the others could make it, it seemed a good time.”
    “When’s the last time you folks were at the lake, Mrs. Connors?”
    She moistened her lips again. “August.”
    “I understand your father called you on Friday morning. Is that right?”
    She nodded.
    “What did he say? How did he sound?”
    “He asked if I could come over for the weekend, and I said I couldn’t.” She realized that the other detective, the woman, was watching her hands, and she glanced down and saw them clutching each other almost spasmodically. She flexed her fingers and spread them, then let her hands rest in her lap. “If I’d gone it wouldn’t have happened,” she said in a low voice. “I could have gone there instead of to the coast. If I…”
    “For God’s sake, Abby! You might have been killed, too,” Brice said. “You couldn’t have stopped the maniac who shot him. You would have been killed with him.”
    “Do you remember exactly what he said that morning?” Caldwell said, ignoring Brice.
    She nodded. “He was happy and excited. He said, ‘This is important. I have something to tell you.’ He was laughing and happy. And I said I couldn’t.”
    “Did he say what was important?”
    She shook her head. “I asked if he could come to town on Saturday, that we could all have dinner Saturday night, and he said he’d just stay put and work.”
    Brice put his arm around her shoulders, squeezed her shoulder lightly. “Lieutenant Caldwell, tell her she couldn’t have prevented what happened out there. It wasn’t her fault.”
    Abby avoided glancing at him; he sounded desperate, pleading. A glance now might be the cue that would