Paranoid(8)

All normal teenaged stuff.

But some of the Xanax is gone. You know it.

Unsure, she changed from the oversized T-shirt she wore as pajamas and pulled on her running gear: jog bra, long-sleeved T-shirt, and tights. Then, in stockinged feet, she hurried downstairs and paused at Harper’s bedroom door.

All was quiet.

She peeked inside. Recently painted in shades of gray, her room possessed some order if you didn’t count the controlled mess of a makeup table covered in bottles, brushes, and tubes. Her daughter lay sleeping on top of her duvet, one arm flung over the edge of her bed, her blond hair falling over her face. Earbuds in place, of course, Harper was dead to the world.

Rachel pulled the door shut, then crossed the hall to her son’s bedroom. Ignoring a DO NOT ENTER sign and a ridiculous swath of crime scene tape stretched across his door, she turned the handle and peered inside. Dylan was wound in a wrinkled pile of bedding, the top of his head all that was visible. The floor was littered with soda and vitamin water bottles, crumpled junk food wrappers, and game controllers, his space age desk covered with a variety of computers and video game equipment, all catching dust under the window.

She’d need a backhoe to clean the room if she ever decided to really clean it.

No, make that he would need the heavy equipment to do the job; it was his mess.

But Dylan was right; his room did look like a crime scene. Enough of a disaster to hide several dead bodies.

Time to change that.

She shut his door quietly, then, with Reno at her heels, double-checked to see that her flashlight and pepper spray were in her pocket, made certain the dead bolt on the front door had been thrown, then made her way through the kitchen and out the back door to the screened-in porch. She let Reno outside. While the dog nosed around the dewy yard, Rachel found her running shoes, slipped them on, and stretched. Finally, she snagged her jacket and the dog’s leash from a peg and was out the door, locking it firmly behind her and wishing the ancient security system was still working. After snapping on the dog’s leash, Rachel eyed the yard once more, noted that the gate was latched, then took off. She broke into a quick jog, Reno loping easily beside her.

The air was thick with the promise of rain, the streets were damp, and the sky was still showing a few stars in the coming dawn. But she was alone and very aware of others in the predawn light: dog walkers, paper deliverers, other joggers, people out and about. She ran through the neighborhood of post–World War II houses, homes built when the logging, saw-milling, and fishing industries were at their height. Some had been added onto over the years, some not. Unfortunately, the booming postwar economy had petered out over the ensuing years, and now Edgewater was no longer bustling and thriving but had become little more than a bedroom community for Astoria, positioned over ten miles west at the mouth of the Columbia.

Rachel’s family had been here for generations and maybe that was the reason she stayed. Now, with her current lack-of-job situation, that might change, she thought as she ducked under a low-hanging fir branch and kept her eyes on the cracked and buckled sidewalk, her peripheral vision taking in her surroundings.

At the highway that ran parallel to the river, traffic was light, so she and the dog cut across, against the light and through the back lot of a boat dealership to the bike path that ran along the Columbia’s banks. A tanker was moving upriver, its massive shape barely visible in the mist that lay on the water’s surface. Farther north, on the opposite shore, a few lights winked.

This was her favorite time of day, in those few hushed moments just before dawn, when the demons of the night shriveled out of her consciousness.

God, she was a freak.

No wonder Cade had taken up with another woman.

Cade again. “Stop it.”

Setting her jaw, she pushed herself, increasing her pace. Beside her, Reno loped along, tongue lolling, ears flapping.

Despite the cool temperature she was beginning to sweat. She stepped up her speed, the dog adjusting his pace. Within minutes she rounded a sweeping bend in the path that ran behind Abe’s all-night diner and caught sight of the Sea View cannery, or what remained of it, a moldering behemoth propped on rotting piers surrounded by a rusted and sagging fence, the same mesh barrier she’d slipped through so many years before. Her jaw tightened.

Twenty years.

And still it haunted her.

Still she ran out here to stare at it every morning, as if one day she would either have answers to the questions that had besieged her for half of her life, or more likely, she would finally give up and never run by the riverfront property again.

She replayed the scene in her mind.

“I just need to talk to Luke,” Lila had insisted as they’d walked from her house to the cannery that night. “It’s really, really important, and I need you with me.”

“I could stay outside.”

“Sure. I guess. But I don’t know how long I’ll be. I have to find him first and it’s so dark. No flashlights allowed. And besides, you’ve already got your gun. Luke gave it to you.”

“Yeah, I know.” Rachel had felt the pellet gun’s weight in her backpack.

“You don’t have to play the game. Just . . . I need you tonight. I don’t want to go alone.” Lila had been biting her lower lip, worrying it, as if afraid Rachel would deny her.

“Fine. Okay, I’ll come,” Rachel had said as the scent of the river reached her nostrils.