Anna Jo Bonners was dressing. She was young, beautiful. She was unencumbered by children, with a slender body that had never carried a baby.
“I know who you are,” Anna Jo said, barely glancing at Lydia.
“Leave him alone,” she said.
“You mean like you do? I’m giving him what he wants and needs. I know about your type. Needy. Always thinking of yourself. No wonder he laughs about you when we’re in bed.” Anna Jo started for the door. “You know what’s so funny? I don’t give a crap about Jim. I’m looking for a good time. You might try it sometime, Mrs. Derby. Jim says you have no passion.”
“Please,” Lydia said. Her body was so tense, she thought if she breathed any harder her breastbone would shatter into a million little pieces.
“I do what I want to do,” Anna Jo said. She was not really a malicious girl, but somehow the fact that Lydia was so upset made her feel good. Jim Derby’s wife’s tears only served to egg her on. Lydia’s anguish gave her power.
“We made love in his car the other day,” she said. “You ever try that?”
Lydia was shaking. “Stop it or I’ll stop you.”
Anna Jo just didn’t seem to care. “That’s a laugh. You couldn’t satisfy your man-how do think you’ll find the courage to stop me? Go home, Mrs. Derby.”
That was when Lydia saw the knife. It was like an antenna transmitting its presence from the open kitchen doorway. Without another second to think it through, she grabbed it from the cutting board, spun around and plunged it into Anna Jo’s midsection. The first cut brought a muffled scream, a kind of guttural spasm of noise that undulated over the cabin’s cedar floorboards. The second brought eye contact, a look of horror and disbelief.
“What are you doing?” Anna Jo said, grabbing at Lydia and the knife as she sank to the floor. Blood splattered over her bra as she moved her hand over her breast to stop the bleeding.
“You’re getting what you deserve!” Lydia said as she stared down at the girl fighting for her life.
“Stop! You’re killing me!” Anna Jo said, as she tried to regain her footing. Halfway up, she slipped on her own pooling blood.
The scene was beyond frenetic. Lydia stood over Anna Jo, working the knife like a piston. Over and over. Twenty-seven times. Later, when she spoke of what she’d done, she was unsure if Anna Jo’s last words were really as she remembered them or if they had melded into some twisted fantasy of what had happened in Ponder’s cabin all those years ago.
“Finally, got some passion,” Anna Jo said.
Or maybe she didn’t say anything at all. She died after the second or third stab into her carotid artery.
Lydia looked up as her husband entered the cabin.
“Good God, what did you do, Lydia?” Jim Derby asked, his eyes terror-filled as he dropped down next to his lover.
“I fixed your mess. Now you clean it up,” she said.
Jim reached for Anna Jo’s blood-soaked neck for a pulse.
“Anna Jo?” came a voice outside the cabin.
It was Tommy.
Jim led his now silent, almost catatonic, wife toward the back door.
“I’ll clean up your mess, Lydia. I guess I owe you.”
In a beat, he’d returned, pretending to see Anna Jo’s body for the first time. Tommy was crying and trying to give his girlfriend mouth to mouth. His whole body was shaking. He picked up the knife and looked at it like it was some kind of mysterious object.
“Get out of here, and get rid of the knife. I’ll clean this up.”
“Who did this?” Tommy said.
The detective hooked his hand under Tommy’s armpit and lifted him to his feet.
“Just keep your mouth shut. I’ll help you,” Jim said. “Get rid of the knife and get out of here.”
“My husband later told me how he rearranged the crime scene. How he’d wiped away my footprints. Blamed his own on an uncharacteristic lapse in detective protocol. He called Tommy’s appearance at the cabin a gift,” Lydia said, looking at Jim. “I believe you said he was the ‘perfect patsy,’ ” she said.
With Birdy looking on in the expansive comfort of the Derbys’ magnificent living room, Lydia was crying her heart out as she confessed to what she’d done. She was literally crumbling into pieces, but Jim “Mr. Family Man for All People” just sat there. He didn’t even try to calm his wife. Birdy wondered what he was thinking about-his political career diving into oblivion? He certainly wasn’t thinking about Lydia.
He got up went for a desk drawer and got his gun.
“I’ll say I thought you were an intruder,” he said, coming toward Birdy.
“No, you won’t,” she said. She held up her cell phone. “I’ve had this on speaker. Your old friend Pat-Stan-the one you said was dead-is listening and recording this entire conversation.”
“You asshole, Jim Derby,” came Pat-Stan’s voice over the cell phone. “I’ve already called the police-and not your bunch of deputies. The state patrol is outside now. Let’s see who has a leg to stand on in court.”
Tommy Benjamin Freeland took his last breath a week after getting word in his Spokane hospital bed that his cousin Birdy had cleared his name. The medical staff said their patient was unable to respond verbally, but he nodded slightly and managed the briefest of smiles. They were sure he understood.
Birdy had wanted to go see him, but a homicide case involving a high school boy in Port Orchard kept her planted in the autopsy suite. She left work when she got word of Tommy’s passing.
Birdy wasn’t a crier, but she couldn’t stop just then. She hurried to her car and drove down the steep hill toward the water. Her mind rolled back to the boy she’d known-the one who had taught her how to fish a creek at night with a flashlight and, in one of her more disgusting lessons, how to dress a deer with only a pocket knife and a whetstone.
She parked the Prius behind the old abandoned Beachcomber restaurant and looked out at the icy, rippling water of Sinclair Inlet. She knew that she’d done all she could. She had been so late to come to the realization that Tommy had needed her all those years. It made her sick and sad.
A young bald eagle, its feathers still a root beer float of brown and white, swooped down to the water and grabbed the silvery sliver of a fish. Its wings pounded the air like the loudest heartbeat imaginable as the bird lifted a small salmon and carried it upward to the cloud-shrouded sun.
Birdy Waterman was a scientist, a doctor. But she was a Makah and that meant a millennium of tradition and lore had been woven into her soul. Her connection to the water, the air, and the creatures that inhabited the natural world was different from that of people who didn’t depend directly on it for their very existence. She watched the eagle as it screeched skyward, its talons skewering the now motionless fish.
Birdy felt a whisper come to her ears. It was gentle, like a breath of a lover.
“I’m free,” the wind said.
She cradled her eyes in the crook of her elbow and then looked out the windshield as she watched the young eagle fly away.
Tommy was at rest. He, finally, was free. And so was Kenny Holloway. The prison guard from Walla Walla who’d set all the events in motion called her after his mother and stepfather’s arrest for murder and conspiracy. He wasn’t celebratory, just grateful for the outcome.
“You meet all kinds of people in prison,” he said. “Some bad with no possibility of redemption. And then sometimes you meet someone like your cousin. If he’d given the slightest reason to continue the cover-up, I would have done so. My mother did what she thought she had to do and that monster she’s married to made it all happen. I wrote the letter to you, because I knew you’d be the one to help fix the big ugly mess.”
“Why didn’t you just come out and tell me?” she asked.
“Telling something to someone gets you nowhere. Your cousin had been saying all these years that he was innocent, yet no one listened. Someone like you had to find out what happened.”
