tenth year as the Granite Falls police chief.
Leaving the groceries in the car, she hurried to the house, letting herself in through the back door. Dan Pullman was standing in the kitchen, and there was something about the look in his eyes as he turned to face her that told Joan the problem wasn’t her mother.
“What is it?” she breathed. “What’s happened?”
Pullman hesitated, but knew there was no way to break the news gently. “There’s been an accident, Joan,” he said, running a hand through his shock of steel gray hair as he uncomfortably shifted the weight of his six-foot- two-inch frame from one foot to the other.
“Not Matt!” she gasped, her heart racing.
Pullman shook his head. “It’s Bill,” he said softly, the emotion in his voice telling her just how bad it was.
“Oh God,” she whimpered, sinking onto a chair. “No. Please… no…”
CHAPTER 7
The whole scene seemed somehow surreal — she was sitting next to Dan Pullman in the front seat of his Taurus, and everything beyond the windshield looked perfectly normal. It was a perfect late fall morning; the ancient maples, birches, and oaks that had been protected by generations of her husband’s family were clothed in brilliant foliage that was almost blinding against the clear turquoise of the sky.
But it was all wrong!
The sky should have been a heavy leaden gray.
There should have been a cold drizzle falling through sodden leaves.
A chill wind should have been blowing, which would at least have accounted for the terrible cold that had fallen over her, making her shiver even in the warmth of the car.
They were half a mile from the house, moving along one of the narrow unpaved tracks that twisted through the woods. The road eventually wound around to the base of the waterfall and the swimming hole that was a favorite picnic area not only of the Hapgoods, but of everyone else in town. She and Bill were always careful to leave it undisturbed until late in the season, when the trees were bare and the road would be covered with shimmering leaves. Then, on a morning as perfect as this one, they’d go out and walk the road, hand in hand, listening to the rustle and crunch of the leaves underfoot, sometimes even abandoning their adulthood to roll around in them like children, their noses filling with dust until they were sneezing helplessly. But this morning the leaves that had already fallen were crushed, the ruts in the road laid bare by the wheels of… How many cars? Had they called an ambulance? For some reason — maybe to keep from thinking about what had happened — Joan found herself trying to remember if she’d heard the wailing of a siren while she’d been moving through the aisles of the market, doing the shopping as if nothing was wrong.
And nothing should have been wrong — she should have gotten back to the house just as Bill and Matt returned from their morning hunt. The scene began to play itself out in her mind: the two of them bursting into the kitchen through the back porch and the mud room, their faces flushed with the chill of the autumn air, regaling her with details of the hunt, each giving the other the credit for whatever they’d bagged.
Matt, grinning at Bill, saying, “I wouldn’t have even seen the deer if it hadn’t been for Dad.”
Bill, sloughing off the compliment: “Matt’s got the eye — and he’s a better shot now than I ever was! Another couple of years and he’ll be good enough for competition!”
But as the car rounded a sharp bend in the road and braked to a stop, the happy scene in her mind was shattered by what she saw.
Two police cars, their lights flashing incongruously in the morning light, were parked haphazardly beneath the canopy of immense maples. And a boxy ambulance, bearing the orange and white paint of the aid unit of the fire department. Its lights, though, were not flashing, and her heart sank as she realized why: for the ambulance, at least, no emergency existed.
Then Joan saw it.
Bill lay facedown on the other side of the stream. If she had stumbled upon him while walking in the woods, she might have assumed he’d merely fallen asleep.
She might even have left him undisturbed, and enjoyed watching him sleep. But the activity around his motionless figure betrayed the truth of what had happened as clearly as the lack of flashing lights on the ambulance.
Yet even in the face of what she had heard from Dan Pullman and what she saw before her, a glimmer of hope still flickered inside her. Before the police car came to a complete stop, Joan scrambled out, waded across the stream, and hurried toward her husband, crouching down beside him.
Reaching out to him.
Touching him.
His skin was cold, his flesh unresponsive.
His hair was matted with blood.
The flicker of hope in her heart guttered and went out.
As the terrible finality of what had happened settled over her, she could no longer bring herself to look at her husband’s body, and raised her eyes. Seeing the bluff rising a few feet away, she suddenly understood.
An accident — just a stupid accident! He and Matt had been on the trail at the top of the bluff, and Bill had lost his footing! “How could it have happened?” she blurted, barely even conscious she was speaking aloud. “He knows that trail so well! He — ”
Then Dan Pullman was beside her. “It wasn’t the fall,” he said softly.
Joan gazed blankly at him, as if the words he’d just spoken had been uttered in some foreign language. Not the fall? What was he talking about? Then, slowly, she became aware of the figures around her.
Figures — not people.
The paramedics, in their white uniforms, made sense to her.
So did the police officers.
But Marty Holmes and Paul Arneson were standing with their sons a few yards away.
Looking at her.
Looking at her, but not talking to her.
And Matt! Where was Matt?
Then she saw him. He was sitting in one of the police cars, his face ashen, his eyes staring straight at her.
Staring at her, but not seeing her.
“What is it?” she whispered, turning back to Dan Pullman. “What killed him?”
When Pullman still said nothing, she reached out again, took Bill by the shoulder, and turned him over.
His body rolled onto its back, and now she could see it.
A hole exactly in the center of his forehead.
Perfectly formed.
But not bloody.
Shouldn’t there have been blood?
She reached out, her fingers hovering over the strange hole, but in the end she couldn’t bring herself to touch it. Then her gaze shifted back to Dan. “How?” she breathed. “Oh, God, Dan, how…?”
“We think Matt shot him,” he said softly.
“An accident,” she breathed. “It had to be…”
Dan’s jaw tightened, and she saw the pain in his eyes, and finally he shook his head. “We don’t know, Joan. It might have been an accident, but — well — ” He bit his lip, then forced himself to go on. “Apparently there was
