No harm befalls the righteous,
but the wicked have their fill of trouble.

—Proverbs 12:21
(Left by Rotten and Emma Lou, rescue dogs who’ve learned a thing or two)

Chapter 21

That night I dreamed of secrets—deep, terrible secrets. In my dream, I saw a man in a hooded trench coat. He was digging in the thick, loamy soil along the water’s edge. Slowly, I moved closer, trying to discern his identity. Lightning flashed overhead, and the air crackled against my skin. I slid a hand across my stomach, swollen, late in pregnancy, heavy. I felt the baby’s heartbeat beneath my fingers, a fragile flutter like the doppler stethoscope at the doctor’s office.

Thunder eclipsed the sound.

The man by the shore stretched upright, then looked over his shoulder. Breath caught in my throat, and I hid behind the cedars, the branches catching my hair. I couldn’t see the face inside the hood, but I could feel him searching for me, scanning the brush cover before returning to his task. My arms rounded my stomach protectively, and I crept closer after the man’s back was turned, my bare feet falling silently in the moss.

The hole was large, rectangular . . . a grave, but shallow. Lightning crackled horizontally across the sky, illuminated the ground. I froze, stared into the hole, saw something white. A shroud, the outline of a body.

Who? Who was buried there, in this shallow grave so near the water?

The man continued his work, not burying the body, but digging the dirt away, finally bending and lifting the shrouded form as if it were weightless, then carrying it to the shore and setting it on the water. A gust of wind blew over the lake, stirred the surface, moaned through the oaks and cedars. Rain fell, soaking the shroud over the body, revealing the outline of a face.

Who? Whose face lay under the cloth?

I took a step closer, then another and another, and watched the body float farther and farther away.

Then I was on a cliff, looking down.

The body neared a small brown boat that was bobbing wildly in the storm. In the boat, children were playing, unaware of the danger—Chrissy and Tag’s daughter, little Sergio from the summer class, Sierra, Birdie, and Nick. They were planting a garden in the bottom of the boat, laughing with each other, oblivious to the body floating near them, unaware of the hooded man on the shore.

“Watch out!” The wind whipped my voice into the air, sending it over the cliffs and away. “Watch out! Get off the water!”

The children couldn’t hear me, and even if they had, there were no oars in the boat, no way to bring it to shore.

The man turned, his head swiveling. I drew back, wrapped my arms protectively over my stomach again, and then I was falling, the ground crumbling beneath me, sending me sliding toward the water. I was falling, and falling, and falling, the roundness in me gone. The baby, gone . . .

I woke with an outcry, gasping for breath, and slipped a hand under my T-shirt and felt the skin, searching for the thickening still so faint that I could hide it beneath my clothes. My own heart thrummed within my chest. I tried to sense the baby’s heartbeat, as well.

It was only a dream. Just a dream.

Everything’s okay.

I wanted to call the doctor, rush to the hospital, have a test, hear the baby’s heartbeat just to be sure.

It’s okay. We’re all right. It was only a dream.

Or a message. Did God still speak to people in dreams? Terrible, unthinkable dreams?

Something threaded through my mind, something Keren had told me when I’d interviewed her about the supper gardens. She’d dreamed of the gardens first. God talks to people in dreams in the Bible, she’d said. Daniel, Ezekiel, Paul, Solomon . . . Why couldn’t He talk to me, tell me something I’m supposed to do, something that’s meant to happen? Job 33:15 says it right out—He speaks in dreams . . .

But this dream, my dream, wasn’t a pleasant vision of kids and gardens. It was terrible, ominous. Like a warning, a threat.

The kids in the boat, the storm, the baby . . . our baby. Gone.

The body floating on the water. It was a warning. A death warning.

Drawing my legs to my chest, I squeezed the covers hard around me like a barrier, tried to push the visions away, but I couldn’t.

Finally I threw the covers aside, crossed the room in the moonlight, my footsteps silent on the cool wood floor, like the footsteps in my dream. The closet door creaked loudly as I opened it. Down the hall, Nick stirred in his bed, and I paused, listening as he settled in again, then I turned on the closet light and sifted through a container of wedding gifts that had yet to be sorted and used.

My fingers circled a shoebox with scraps of lacy wedding wrap still clinging to the corners. A sense of calmness fell over me, quieting my heart as I opened the box. Inside lay Grandma Louisa’s bridal Bible with the pearlescent Lucite cover. The scent of my grandmother’s Charleston house wafted up, teased my senses with salt air, Spanish moss, dust, must, and the long history of Ellery brides. This Bible always goes to the last bride in the family, Mother’s voice was in my ear now. Each bride carries it, and the last one keeps it for the next generation. It’s from Grandma Louisa to you. I have to say, you made it wait a while. . . .

The light cascaded over my skin, the Bible reflecting the moonlight through the window and seeming to glow with life as I slid my fingers across the cover. I parted the pages, searched the table of contents, and found the book of Job, the chapter and verse Keren had quoted when I interviewed her about the supper gardens.

For God speaketh once, yea twice, yet man perceiveth it not. In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falleth upon men, in slumberings upon the bed; Then he openeth the ears of men, and sealeth their instruction, that he may withdraw man from his purpose, and hide pride from man. He keepeth back his soul from the pit, and his life from perishing by the sword.

A warning . . . was this nightmare a warning?

And of what?

Somehow, I had to find the truth, to sort through the secrets hidden beneath the surface of Moses Lake. I knew it in a way I’d never known anything in my life. This was the reason I was here.

Something terrible waited if I failed.

The sensation lingered as the night passed, sleep whisking over my mind, a ragged and featherlight veil. When I woke in the morning, I was tired and sore. Nick was standing beside the bed, cuddling his favorite stuffed Dalmatian under his chin, the plastic eyes watching me along with Nick’s.

“Where’s Daddy?” His voice was barely a whisper, as if he were afraid to disturb the stillness in the house.

“Daddy stayed at the hospital last night. Remember I told you that Mr. West had an accident and the doctors have to take care of him for a while? Tag came last night and got clothes to take to Daddy at the hospital, and he fixed the battery cable on our Jeep while he was here. Remember that?”

Nick blinked at me with huge eyes, a little pout lip jutting out. “I wanna my daddy,” he whimpered, as if he sensed my uneasiness, as if he felt the undercurrent of fear that had floated with me through sleep.

Pushing against the bed, I sat up, my back in a twisted coil and my shoulders aching. I felt like I’d been run over by a bus. “Oh, honey, Daddy’s okay. He’ll probably come home in a little while. We could call him on his phone and see how Mr. West is doing, how about that?” The previous day swirled through my mind, the details growing crisp as the haze of sleep faded.

“Do you and puppy want to find my purse and get my phone for me?” I needed a moment to myself, just to think.

Nick wandered off with the puppy’s rear end tucked under his arm. When he came back, he wasn’t alone. He had my phone, the stuffed puppy, and a real one. Pecos was trailing behind. “Nick, Pecos is an outside dog,” I said.

Nick looked at me with those big, sweet eyes, and I knew it was hopeless. I let the dog stay. He sat politely beside the bed, gracing the room with the scent of creek water and cattle pens, while I called Daniel and got the report on Jack’s condition. No change, basically. Mason had been in with Jack during the night as much as the nurses would allow. He thanked us for bringing him clean clothes.

I didn’t ask Daniel any more questions. It didn’t seem like a good idea to talk about it with Nick listening, and I wondered if Mason might be somewhere nearby Daniel. If any of my suspicions were valid, the last thing I wanted was for Mason to know that we had doubts about him.

“Are you coming home this morning?” I wanted Daniel to say yes. Outside, the early sun was dimming, clouds sliding over Chinquapin Peaks. A storm was on the way. I didn’t want to spend the day alone. I needed to talk things through with Daniel, to see if, between the two of us, we could make some sense of this. I wanted to tell him about the dream and have him chuckle and say it didn’t mean anything.

“Until Jack wakes up, I plan to stay here.” There was a change in his voice. I sensed that Mason was there with him.

“Nick wants to talk to you,” I said and handed the phone over.

Slipping from the bed, I stood looking at Grandma Louisa’s Bible on the night table. The dream, the Scripture, the warning repeated in my mind, a strange contrast to Nick’s innocent questions about Jack’s accident. Nick thought he could rescue Jack’s truck and put it back together like one of his Hot Wheels cars.

He wandered into the dining room, and I went to the kitchen and poured the cereal, absently listening to snatches of conversation. Daniel and Nick were discussing the fact that, with Jack in the hospital and Daniel gone, Nick was head-man-in-charge at home. Nick, standing by the window in his T-shirt and Toy Story undies, gazed at the lawn and scratched his rear end as he discussed whether he might need to take care of the mowing. “I gotted my mow-air.” Holding his hands in front of himself, he pantomimed pushing his little plastic mower, as if Daniel could see. “I gotta milk my cow, too, Daddy . . .”

Ohhh, the cow . . . The poor thing was probably out there suffering right now. Keren would already be on her way to school to prepare for her summer enrichment kids. I’d have to call Al. How much different could milking a cow and milking a goat be, really?

I’d just started to smile, felt a little, private laugh, when the questions about Jack’s accident rushed in like a cloud shadow, covering everything with a watercolor wash of gray. The laughter fell away, out of place now.

What in the world were Daniel and I going to do about all this? Should I share our suspicions with anyone? Normally, I might have told Al, gotten her advice, but even Al was perhaps not who she seemed to be. What was she hiding, and why did I feel like that name, Alex Beck, should mean something to me?

What was I missing here? What was just beyond my fingertips?

I knew that name. I did . . .

I moved Nick’s cereal and the milk to the dining room, set everything on the table, then flipped open my laptop and entered a name into the browser window. Alex Beck. Over six million entries came back—everything from genealogy and family tree makers, to stories about a new teen singing sensation and unfortunate web ads for a porn star by the same name. None of it seemed to have anything to do with Al Beckenbauer. After five pages of entries, I gave up and closed the computer. Whatever was going on with Al really wasn’t the most pressing issue right now. The real issue was Jack, and the accident, and whether Mason had anything to do with it.

When Nick finished chatting, I picked up the phone and paged through the contacts, then dialed Corbin while pouring milk on Nick’s cereal. How much did Corbin know about the case against Jack West, twenty-five years ago?

My brother-in-law’s voice registered surprise when he answered the phone. “Hey, Mallory, what’s going on?” The question came with an underlying note of concern. It wasn’t normal for me to call Corbin—especially not first thing in the morning on a work day.

“Nothing . . . well, there is something, but . . . Okay, let me stop and start over. I’m not calling because there’s a family emergency or anything. Don’t queue up any panic-mail to Carol, okay?” If Carol or Mom heard that a ranch truck had just gone off a cliff with a passenger in it, they’d be ordering up a moving van and cleaning out the rumpus room by noon today.

“Oh . . . kayyy . . .” The line crackled with Corbin’s expectation as I moved to the bedroom and closed the door.

I took a breath, then spilled the whole, strange story of the last few weeks—Mason’s arrival, the change in Jack’s demeanor, his state of near euphoria, all the money spending and gift-giving, and then the accident, the sheriff’s deputy talking with Mason, Daniel’s suspicions, the fact that he’d chosen to stay nearby Jack at the hospital, and the old letter I’d found in the cookbook.

“It’s just . . . like, a gut feeling. We don’t have any proof, except that early on, Jack told Daniel not to ever park the truck so that it was pointed toward the cliffs. Apparently, Jack’s second wife and his stepson made that mistake when they were out Christmas tree hunting on the ranch decades ago. The truck started rolling and careened into the lake. They weren’t in it, but it almost ran them over. It seems like a lesson you wouldn’t forget, doesn’t it? Now I wonder if that’s what the letter in the cookbook was about. Maybe she was running from Mason, not Jack.”

“That’s certainly a valid question,” Corbin agreed. “So, how can I help?”

Outside, a peacock called, and I jumped, then checked the room around me, looked out the window, had the strange feeling that someone might be watching from the shadows. “Hang on a minute, Corbin.” I peered into the yard, moved to the kitchen and leaned close to the window, scanned the driveway for any signs of human activity. I walked through the house and located Nick. He’d finished his cereal and settled himself in the front room, watching PBS and playing with the toys that had come from Jack’s house. Pecos lay beside him, his ears perked with interest as Nick carried on imaginary conversations between the characters in his pretend ranch drama. He’d included everyone—his dad, Jack, Tag and Chrissy, all the ranch hands. Even the loyal pickup-riding cowboy dogs were part of the story.

For an instant, I forgot about the phone call, the hospital, the questions. I slipped into Nick’s imaginary world, took in the squeak-squeak of tiny axles as his hands propelled the toy trucks, the purr of his lips making motor sounds, the thinner look of his fingers, changing daily it seemed as the last baby dimples faded from his knuckles . . .

The child who’d once owned those toys became real in my mind again. The little boy, who for reasons we could only guess at, never had the chance to grow up. Could Mason possibly be involved in something so heinous? Could he have been there the day their truck rolled over the cliffs? Could he have made another attempt as they vacationed in Mexico, and been successful that time?

The question haunted me as I retreated to the bedroom and shut the door again. “Corbin, how much do you know about Mason West? I mean, what’s the scuttlebutt on The Hill? I know he’s connected on the federal level, that he has aspirations in national politics. Have you heard anything?”

“Well, the name’s not unfamiliar to me. . . . Let me think a minute.” Corbin paused contemplatively. “You’re asking in relation to the accident? As in, you really do think he had something to do with it?” Corbin’s interest level was perking up, his reporter-nose sniffing out a story.

“Corbin, this has to stay between us.”

“Of course, of course. You know I’m stuck spending ninety percent of my time on local stuff in this rathole, anyway.”

I was reminded again of Corbin’s burning desire for that one big story that would get the New York Times, USA Today, or the Washington Post to look his way. “I mean it, Corbin.”

“I know. I know. I’ve heard the name, but that’s about all I can tell you off the top of my head. I’m not sure if I remember any mention of him in the double murder case against Jack West all those years ago, but I do feel like there’s something more recent. Can’t quite bring it to mind, but some kind of coverage with his name attached. Let me do a little poking around, see if I can find anything on the research service and whatnot. I’ll call you back in a few.”

“Thanks, Corbin.”

“What’s a brother-in-law for?”

Nick rattled the bedroom doorknob, and I jumped like a spy caught in the throes of a secret mission. “Corbin, I’d better go. Nick needs me.”

“All right, Mallory. Listen, keep these questions to yourself until I have a chance to do some digging. You’re dealing with powerful people here, you know? And when little people dig around in the hidden business of big people . . . well, accidents seem to run rampant around there, don’t they? Players like the Wests like to keep their secrets buried.”

Nick pounded on the door because he couldn’t turn the handle far enough to open it. “I’ll be careful, I promise.” If there was one thing I’d learned in DC, it was that when you’re dealing with powerful men, you need to be careful whose territory you tread on.

I opened the door, and Nick was on the other side, dressed in an odd combination of shorts, a T-shirt, his Junior Adventurer vest, and cowboy boots. He gave me an expectant look. “Misser Al’s here!” he said and led me to the back room, then pointed at Al, who was sitting on the back porch, patiently scratching Pecos’s head.

“We gonna go milk my cow, ’kay?” Nick jittered in place, excited.

Al waved from the porch as I opened the door and Nick bolted through. “Thought you might need some help with the cow this mornin’. Figured I’d better drop by.” She looked me up and down, taking in my sweats and slippers. “Looks like you’re not ready to go to the barn yet. Nick and I’ll get started on our own.” She held a hand out to Nick, and he pulled her out of her chair.

I thanked her, then stood in the doorway watching them walk toward the gate, and thinking, Alex Beck . . . Alex . . . Beck . . .

By the time I’d dressed and made it to the back door, Corbin was calling my cell again. I juggled the phone while pulling on the rubber boots I’d bought for barn use. “Hey, Corb, did you find anything?”

“Yeah, just a little. Mason West does have some hefty national connections. There’s a long-term relationship with the Reirdon family, as in Senator Reirdon, as in committee-chair-of-anything-that-matters Reirdon. Mason West and Reirdon’s eldest son were college roommates and fraternity brothers, so the connection goes deep. Reirdon helped Mason get his start in politics. There’s a tight relationship there, and these are not people you want to mess with, by the way—I’m assuming you’re aware of that already, having worked in DC. You know that Reirdon had an intern disappear back in the late nineties, and she was found in an alley, murdered after an Internet date? Rumor was that she was meeting a reporter, not a date that night. Her family said she would never go on an Internet date, and that she had a boyfriend back home. You really need to be careful about sniffing around these people, okay?”

“All right. Thanks, Corbin.” This mess was getting more complicated, more ominous by the minute. Powerful connections, murdered interns . . . Everywhere I turned, there was a new secret. Was any of this related to Jack’s accident? To Mason’s reason for being here?

I stood staring out the window, my fingers drumming on the glass. “By the way, Corbin . . . does the name Alex Beck ring any bells?”

Corbin chuckled into the phone. “Whoa, now that’s a blast from the past. I’m surprised you don’t remember that one.”

I hesitated, unsure I could handle one more surprise. Maybe I was better off not knowing. “I feel like I should know it. . . .”

“Your dad couldn’t stand that woman.” Corbin’s tone was lighter now. “Reporter. Bleached blond. Did the DC beat for that Nightcap news show? Eighties, I guess, maybe early nineties. Remember? Hard questions, hard-hitting news.” His tone deepened and took on reverb. I recognized the slogan. It wafted from my memory banks like the scent of high-school cafeteria food, bringing with it snippets of memory.

Corbin was being gentle. My father not only couldn’t stand that show, the blond-haired woman reporter was practically the bane of his existence. She had a penchant for exposing lobbyists and legislators cuddled up together on expensive dinners, trips, golf games, flights on private planes, and other bonding activities. She outted lobbyists guilty of failing to file the proper reports, exposed them to civil penalties, and occasionally uncovered criminal violations of lobbying law. She wrote books exposing Washington’s dirty laundry, past and present. She delighted in such things, and as a result, my father’s blood pressure notched up several points every time her face appeared on his TV screen.

“That’s Alex Beck?” I stammered, still trying to paint the woman’s face in my mind, to reconcile it in any way with the Al I knew. She was roughly the right age, but other than that . . .

“Mmm-hmm,” Corbin murmured contemplatively. “Can’t remember what ever happened to her. She dropped out of sight for some reason a long time ago. There was something . . . but I can’t quite tell you what.”

I wasn’t sure I wanted to know. “Thanks, Corbin. Listen, I’ve got to go.” I hung up without even waiting for an answer, put a hand on the doorknob, then just stood there, thinking. Could Al possibly be Alex Beck? The Alex Beck? Was that why her past before coming to Moses Lake was such a mystery? Why she never wanted to talk about any of her history?

Was that why she was always so interested in Jack, and now Mason?

Inside the cowgirl rancher, was the rabid reporter still lurking, just looking for the right story to make a comeback?