In the Clearing (Tracy Crosswhite #3)(93)

Reynolds looked like he’d taken a sedative, only partially present in the room, as Tracy continued to recount what transpired that night. Tracy had no doubt the part of him not present had gone back to the clearing, back forty years, to that horrible moment. And she had no doubt that, despite all of his seeming success and wealth, that he’d gone back to that night many times. He just hid it better in public than the others, hid it behind the fa?ade he’d created, behind the big house and the successful business and the gregarious personality, but Eric Reynolds was riddled with guilt. That was the reason he lived alone, unmarried, without children, unable to sleep. That was why the gun was on the poker table, and Tracy bet it had been on that table many other nights.

“Kimi threw herself in the river,” he said. “She was upset because Tommy Moore came into the diner that night with Cheryl Neal.”

“And I’m sure you want to believe that, Eric. I’m sure that over the years you’ve done everything you could to try to convince yourself that’s what happened. Because the alternative was waking up every morning thinking you’d killed that girl—and that would have been just too horrible to face. That’s what our minds do. They protect us. They bury those memories that would cripple us, so that we can live with ourselves.” She looked to the still image of Bradley Cooper. “Soldiers understand it. They’re asked to do horrible things. They see horrible things. And they wonder if that makes them horrible people. Does doing a horrible thing make you a horrible person?”

“What’s the answer, Detective?”

“You didn’t mean to kill Kimi Kanasket—not when you ran her over. That was an accident, an accident as a result of a bad decision fueled by testosterone and anger and drugs, but it certainly wasn’t intentional. It didn’t make you a murderer, Eric. And if you and the others had just owned up to what you did that night, Darren and Archie would likely still be alive, and Hastey wouldn’t have spent his life crawling into a beer can every day, and you wouldn’t be living out here alone.

“But you didn’t do that. You all agreed to never talk about what happened. You left Kimi there, and you drove the others home, but when you got home you realized you couldn’t leave her body out there because it left things unfinished. So you changed into your hunting boots because it had started to snow, and you drove back to the clearing. You put Kimi in the back of the Bronco, drove her to the river, and threw her into the water. That, Eric, was a deliberate act. That’s what you can’t deny. You can’t camouflage it behind this fa?ade you’ve created.

“And when you were finished, you took the Bronco to Lionel Devoe, who was running his father’s businesses at that time, and you had it fixed and the windshield replaced, and you thought that was the end of it. But it wasn’t. It wasn’t the end because Buzz Almond wouldn’t let that be the end of it. And it didn’t have to be this way, Eric. That’s the most ironic and saddest thing of all. It didn’t have to be like this.”

“It didn’t?”

“No,” she said. “Because Kimi wasn’t dead.”

Reynolds stopped petting the dogs. His foot no longer bounced.

“She was still alive, Eric, and if you had just done the right thing, if you had just called for help, Kimi would have lived.”

Tracy watched the remaining color drain from Eric Reynolds’s face, leaving him as pale and sickly as a corpse.

Reynolds didn’t stand when Tracy rose from her chair. The two dogs sat up, watching her. Tracy considered taking the gun, but she had no right to confiscate it, and Eric Reynolds had access to many guns and rifles, and he’d no doubt had those guns out many nights but had never used one. She didn’t think he would use it tonight either.

Tracy left him physically sitting in his chair with his two dogs. Mentally, however, she could tell he’d returned to the clearing, a place no doubt he frequented often in his dreams. She wondered if this time Reynolds was staring down at Kimi Kanasket, trying to comprehend what Tracy had just revealed, and wondering what might have been if he’d only done the right thing.





CHAPTER 33


Tracy didn’t have to wait outside Reynolds’s gate or along the side of the road. If she was right, she knew where he’d go when he mentally returned from the clearing.

And he would go. He’d go because he wouldn’t be able to not go.

She’d kept her promise to Jenny and remained in phone contact, advising her of her intent. The backup followed.

Tracy parked just up the block, not worried about her truck being seen. Reynolds didn’t know her truck, and it blended nicely with the other trucks and older-model vehicles on the block. Then again, she doubted Eric Reynolds would have cared even if he did know. The two sheriff’s vehicles were one block over, out of sight.

Snow began to fall through the gaps in the trees, the kind of large, heavy flakes she and Sarah used to catch on their tongues and watch float to the ground from Tracy’s bedroom window, as excited as on Christmas Eve. They knew the snow would stick, and that meant a possible snow day from school and playing all day in the backyard with their friends. It was one of the best memories from her childhood, one she clung to and refused to have taken from her.

The sound of the big Silverado’s engine preceded the glow of its headlights in her truck’s passenger-side mirror as it approached. She imagined the Bronco limping down the same street that night forty years earlier, broken and damaged. Eric Reynolds drove past Tracy without turning his head, continuing to the small one-story home in which he’d grown up, though his gaze still seemed to be forty years in the past.