IT WAS only on the bad days that Matt felt as if he should simply walk away from Coeur d’Alene, leaving behind all that he knew, all that he didn’t know.
In the end, Matt felt he might not ever know what demons had haunted Russ, what final act was irredeemable. For that reason, he felt he should be angry at Russ, for not being able to tell him more, for not being able to save himself. Yet the anger would not come to him. Something in him had let go of that obligation.
In fact, since his father’s funeral, the need to resolve things had diminished until it was no more than a murmur. Now the past was in focus, he wasn’t afraid to look back to things he’d left behind long ago. Often, it was as if he were looking through cloudy water that clears as a current passes through it.
For that same reason, he had not spoken to anyone about Russ’s final words in the car. When he got around to it, it seemed to him that Arlen’s little girl might be the best place to start.
There was no hurry, the dead would wait.
The speech he’d given at his father’s funeral had left a lasting impression. Weeks later, his father’s former colleagues, and even those who had not attended the funeral, continued to stop him on the street to thank him for what he’d said that day. They seemed to see him in a new light. Increasingly, he saw himself that way as well.
One month after his father’s funeral, Matt became interim sheriff for Bitterroot County. Andrew Merrill was due to leave office officially in a few weeks, and a special election to replace Russell White was scheduled for the following year.
“I can think of no better person to fill the office during this time of uncertainty,” said Richard Stanford. “We can use your insight and experience. We owe it to you.”
On his first day back in the Sheriff’s Department, Matt was surprised to find his office untouched. Only the resort files had been riffled and removed. Phyllis simply showed him to his desk, as if no time had passed. There was a huge backlog of bookings and case reports to review on top of his filing cabinet, covering his in-box with paper.
Despite the work he had ahead of him, Matt couldn’t seem to get the resort off his mind. Although Russ and Curtis were both dead, technically the case of Arlen’s murder had not been closed. All information related to the case had been effectively purged by Andy Merrill before his departure, but there were few secrets remaining in the files anyway, and there were also few of the answers Matt sought.
When he’d worked through half the backlog, he located Curtis Siwood’s mother in Phoenix. Mrs. Siwood had little to say. Her son had always been distant and vindictive. Recently, Curtis’s landlord had called, wondering why rent had not been paid. She found his apartment full of the broken wet boles of cactus plants and the rotting parts of dead animals.
Matt offered to return Curtis’s remains to her, but she was not interested. “Leave him be,” she said. “He always loved it up in the Idaho country. I seen pictures of your lake—looked mighty peaceful to me.”
Matt had kept the letters written to him by Irene Closner, he reread them frequently. In some letters, she talked about the Silver Valley. In others, she wrote about their friendship and things he’d told her. The worst passages to read were always near the end, when she begged him to visit her in the hospital. But the letters he searched for were the ones that would tell him details about the accident and its aftermath, events he could only dimly remember even yet.
He never found what he looked for—there were only hints and warnings of Valerie’s involvement, of how Russ had managed to convince Matt of his guilt. It was now impossible to get the full story—but Matt supposed he didn’t need that now. Irene had forgiven him, at least, and that seemed enough, most days.
Often, he thought of her, as she had traveled in her hospital room on her lonely path toward death. He thought too of Kev’s furrowed brow, that deep hurt he masked so well with anger, and the wind that had filled the cabin in a sudden gust, covering the boy’s burned corpse with a scattering of snow.
Matt tried not to make too much of his past mistakes.
It also helped not to think too much of the future. Richard Stanford was urging him to stand as a candidate in the next election cycle and keep the office. Yet Will Herrick might find it in himself to recover from the public disclosure about the Sunshine disaster and the many newspaper articles about his company’s past activities. And one of these days, either one of the Herricks might fund an opposing candidate, more amenable to their will. Matt was not concerned. He simply took it all one day at a time.
As was now his habit early in the mornings, Matt rowed a half mile out in the lake and back again. In that time before the day took hold, a light mist sometimes dropped into rain as he worked his way across. The sound of a car on the other side of the cove came across as something distant and scattered. The splash of the oars, like other sounds, was distorted by the water in the air. The waking city was muted by the mist.
Recently, he’d noticed that the cattails were in bloom, it was almost summer again. He watched them growing beside the lake, pathways carved through the sedge grass.
The paths were made by animals, but every time he saw the grass bent apart, he thought someone had walked through, making their own way wherever they went. Without fail, it came to him, a memory of the day he’d tracked footprints through tall grass, the soles cracked and distinctive. Sometimes the memory of that day spent walking the lakeside with Russ White was conflated with Pop’s desperate stare, the blasting cap held in his wrinkled hand. Often, Matt seemed to remember both dead men in the same moment.
And when a mist rolled across the lake, he thought of the ghostly static of the videotape, that strange, haunted purpose in Curtis Siwood’s gaze. Then he imagined that someone came walking across the lake, footsteps ghostly and unreal on the water: he could almost see him stepping from the fog. Sometimes he thought it was himself, someone finding their way. At other moments, it seemed to be the drowned man who came.
Yet always, memory spoke to him out of the depths, the words coming clearer every time. Forgive me, this isn’t how my life was supposed to go . . . Forgive me . . .
The thought always faded back into the fog, whispers dropping away before Matt could understand all that he had to say. Matt always imagined that the apparition walked silently over the water, past the splashing oars across the lake. He edged into mist and was gone, headed back into the past.
When he rowed in the early mornings, Matt would stay in the stillness for whole minutes as the quiet rose off the lake, wondering who waited for him out on the water.