Snow Creek(67)

“Come on in, Becky.”

The door opens to reveal a lithe blond with blue eyes and only a touch of eye shadow.

She looks at me, then at her boss. A confused expression comes across her pretty face.

“Cathy said there was a parent here. I don’t recognize you. I’m sorry.”

I tell her to sit.

“I recognize you, Sarah.”

Her neck grows taut, like rubber bands nearly stretched to snapping.

“My name is Becky, not Sarah.”

I hold out my phone and show her the same family portrait that had hung on the wall in the Wheaton living room.

Her hands grip the arms of the chair.

“That’s not me. I mean, it looks like me. It’s definitely not me.”

She’s pulling herself under. Inside she’s clawing at the surface and trying with all she can to find a way out.

There is no way out.

“I know what you did,” I tell her. “That’s why I’m here.”

“I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about. I didn’t do anything.”

In a flash she bolts for the door. She’s unsteady. She’s a blinded deer on an icy road. My new best friends from Chelan County are right there to stop her. She sinks to the shiny linoleum floor, splayed out like a broken doll.

Her face is flushed and she’s sobbing.

“Sarah Wheaton, you’re under arrest for the murder of your parents, Merritt and Ida Wheaton.”

I finish reading her rights while cuffing her on the way to the car, thanking the Chelan deputies for their help and promise to follow up when I get back to the office.

Sarah is a sad, broken record.

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry,” she cries, taking her place in the back seat. “I didn’t want my brother to do it. I told him that it was wrong. That he could go to jail.”

She’s been following the news.

“Remember,” I caution, “anything you say can and will be used against you in court.”

I tell her she can have a lawyer appointed free of charge.

“I know,” she says. “But I really didn’t do anything wrong.”

I merge on Highway 2 and head west. I didn’t get the pretzel, but I did bring home a killer. Sheriff will be both elated and disappointed. I want to call in with an update. But I don’t.

Sarah wants to talk.

“My mom and I came into the workshop. Joshua had just killed our father.” She stops to remember or to fabricate her story.

I’ll know in a moment which.

“My dad was molesting me, Detective Carpenter. He had been for years. When Joshua found out he told me he was going to put a stop to it. I thought he was going to call the sheriff. He didn’t. When my mom and I went into his workshop that night it was because we heard them fighting. Fighting more than normal.”

As she speaks my eyes leave the road longer than they should as I watch her in the mirror.

“Your father was molesting you.”

She senses my sympathy and pounces on it as some kind of common ground that will work some magic and somehow save her where her brother had failed.

“Yes. It was terrible.”

“And no one knew.”

“Not until I told my brother.”

While I’m an accomplished liar, I sometimes hate the game. This is one of those times. She’s young and out of her league. What she’ll tell me next, I think, will be a lie.

“Your mom didn’t know.”

She shakes her head.

“Really,” I say.

“Yes. She had no idea.”

“What happened to her in the hut that night, when the two of you went inside to find Joshua killing your father?”

She stays quiet for a long time. I’m hopeful that what she’ll say next will correct the record.

No such luck.

“My mother ran to help my dad, and Joshua went crazy. He hit her with the hammer. She went down to the floor. Blood everywhere.”

“Ellie told me another story.”

“Ellie wasn’t there.”

“You’re right. But she knows things, doesn’t she?”

“She couldn’t know anything, Detective. I was gone before she got there.”

“I said I believe you were molested. Don’t screw things up by lying to me, Sarah.”

She looks out the window. Tears flow from both eyes. She’s being pulled under again.

This time, for real.

“Okay. I’ll tell you.”





Sarah Wheaton promised herself that she’d been violated by her father for the last time. She lay still in her bed as he passed by her room. She prayed that he wouldn’t return for a second visit that night. Sometimes he did. Other times, weeks would pass, and she’d tried to convince herself that what he’d been doing to her since she was four was over. She told herself that, at sixteen, whatever had attracted him to her as a little girl, had finally outgrown him.

Wishful thinking, she found out, takes the mind on a journey to false hope.

What Sarah told Joshua the year before, though, had made it sound as if it had been only one time, and it hadn’t been full-on intercourse, but merely fondling her while she slept. Her story was sketchy on purpose. She wanted Joshua to draw more out of her, help her. False hope. He said that he’d stick around until she was eighteen and then both of them would get out of there.