Rapid Descent

Nolan shook his head. “Not yet. Waiting to see what the SAR turns up. But I didn’t call you back just to look at this river crap. I have a job for you, Junior.”

Orson didn’t like the gleam in his father’s eyes. Not one bit.

8

Listening to the searchers’ comments on the radio as they were relayed up and down the river, Nell fought tears and lost when they found Joe’s kayak and removed it from its securing lines. Her head in her arms at the kitchen table, she heard each report. Waiting. Waiting for any good news. Waiting for them to find Joe. What she heard was information she already knew. The kayak was empty. No supplies. And no Joe nearby, on a rock waiting for help, trapped in a strainer.

No Joe. Not anywhere, alive or…or dead.

One kayaker was assigned to bring the boat in to the takeout, and the team started down the last stretch of the river. It would take a few hours to do a cursory search. There wasn’t time to do a full, in-depth search before sunset.

Nell’s tears splattered on the kitchen table with tiny taps of sound to form a pool. Her breath shuddered along her throat as if claws ripped at it. She silently begged God, begged him, to let her husband be alive. She knew, in some miniscule rational part of her mind, that she was out of control. She, who never cried. Never prayed. “Please,” she whispered. “Please.”

Nell felt Claire’s cool palm on the back of her neck, stroking and soothing. “It’s okay, honey. They’ll find him.”

Though she heard the lie in her mother’s voice, Nell swiveled in her seat and wrapped her arms around Claire’s waist. Her face buried in Claire’s stomach, her mother’s jeans rough on her tender skin, she wept.

Claire massaged her back and neck as the dammed-up emotions flooded out and away. Her mother murmured softly, “It’s okay. You just cry it all out. I’m here, honey. I’m here.”

“I can’t do this,” Nell whispered brokenly. “I can’t do it. I need Joe back. I need him. I’m not strong like you. I can’t do this.” She rocked her forehead against her mother. “I can’t do it.”

Claire’s stroking hand slowed and stopped. “I wasn’t strong when your father died. I was a mess.”

Nell looked up into her mother’s face. “You never cried.”

“I cried. I cried and cussed and threw things and cried and cussed some more. And I hated him for the longest time.” Her pink-lipsticked mouth curled in a sad smile and she brushed Nell’s stiff hair back behind an ear. “And even after all that, even after all these years, I still miss the cheatin’ son of a gun. Can you believe it?”

Nell laughed, a hiccup of surprise. “No.”

Claire waved a hand in the air as if to rub away the negative. “I do. Still. But it was pure torture to live through, him running off with that woman, the church elder’s wife, and them getting killed together. All the gossip at church and in town. The whisperin’. The way the newspaper kept on and on with the story and brought it up over and over during that trucker’s trial for drunk driving and resisting arrest. It was all I could do to get through each day.”

“I didn’t know,” Nell said, the words hoarse.

“’Course not. I had to protect you. You were mine, all I had left to love and provide for. So I survived. And now you have me to survive for. ’Cause I don’t know what I’d do without you.” She wiped Nell’s face with the pads of her thumbs. “Come on. Lie down a while. You need to rest.”

“I can’t sleep.” Fresh tears ran down her face, stinging like salt in wounds. “I can’t. Not until they find Joe.”

“I didn’t say anything about sleep. I said you should rest. I’ll sit with you. And I’ll listen to the radio. And if you doze off, I promise to wake you if they find anything. Anything at all. Come on.” Claire pulled Nell up. Docile, she followed her mother to the bed. Like a child, she lay down when her mother folded back the sheets and held them for her. They were fresh and cool and smelled of Joe. Instantly, she was asleep.

Orson watched from the shadows as Nolan reached to knock at the door of the motor home. It flung open and the old man stepped back, jerking his hand from the swinging door. He looked up to see those blue eyes. Nell Stevens’s mother. Claire. His dad’s mouth opened, but no words came out. Orson hid a smile.

The woman stared down from three steps up, sparks flashing. She came down the steps at him, her face flushing red with anger. His dad, who had faced down moonshiners and pot growers and backcountry mountaineers carrying shotguns and a total disregard for the law, stepped back. She walked up to him, shoulders rigid and fire in her eyes, backing him another two steps before he was able to stop his backpedaling progress.

She leaned into him, her chest a fraction of an inch from his, her chin outthrust, her finger pointing. Pale pink nail polish, Orson saw, that matched her lipstick.

“If you think you’re gonna wake my daughter, you have another think coming. My girl is asleep, after crying her eyes out. You can just wait. You hear me?”

“I wouldn’t think about—I just need to ask—”

“You need to ask nothin’. I know how you cops work.” She put her hands on her hips. Orson saw his dad looking at her mouth. “You start out all sweet and nice and asking simple questions and then you lower the boom with some other awful question that says you think somebody’s guilty of something. It’s a sneak attack, is what it is. Jist like that sneaky way you questioned me about it all without telling me you was a cop. And my Nell is too broke up over Joe to be hurt like that.”

“Miz Bartwell, I—”

“I know you got a job to do. I know somebody’s gotta ask the hard questions and look for guilt. I know somebody’s gotta interrogate, and investigate, and stick his nose into other people’s business. Like assuming my girl is guilty of killing her husband and hiding the body. Right?” she demanded. She shoved her chin closer, nearly touching the old man’s chest. “Right? That’s what you gotta ask?”

Orson was pretty sure his dad had started to sweat. He nodded like he couldn’t help himself. He’d probably have agreed that the sky was green if she told him to. Twenty-five years as an investigator questioning the biggest and baddest the streets had to offer, and this little bitty woman…Orson laughed silently. She scared the hell outta him.

“I understand that,” she said. “But you gotta understand that I gotta job to do too. And my job is to protect my baby. And if you try to hurt her, if you try asking mean questions jist to see her cry, if you try to make her feel worse than she does now for gettin’ hurt and makin’ her husband go down a dangerous river alone to get her help, and then not come back from it, I’ll scratch out your blasted eyes. I’ll cut out your innards and leave your bloody, dead body where only the maggots can find it. And then I’ll pray over your dead, bleeding body that the Lord will somehow save your immortal soul, if you really have one. Are we clear?”

“Pretty clear, ma’am.”

“Come back later.” Claire stomped back up the steps and closed the door in his face.

“Did that little woman just threaten you with blinding, death and maggots?” Orson asked from the shadows. “Isn’t it against the law to threaten an officer of the court?”

Nolan looked over at Orson, leaning a shoulder against the side of the RV, arms crossed over his wet suit, ankles crossed. Amused as hell and not hiding it. Nolan shook his head. “Yeah. I think I’m in love.”

Orson snorted. “She’d eat you up and spit you out, old man.”

“Like I said. I think I’m in love.”

“One ’a these days your love of bitchy women is going to get you killed.”

“Feisty. Not bitchy.”

“You say potato, I say bitchy. But I did notice that she didn’t use a single cussword in all that tirade.”

“And she did offer to pray for me.” Nolan laughed and nodded his head at the river; the two men walked toward the slow-moving water. “You ready to go undercover?”

“I’m ready. But you know for a fact that the more experienced men will say I got this job on your coattails.”

“I asked who had river experience. You were the only one, Junior. Get in there and make nice with the kayak search crew. And don’t screw up, son.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence,” he said wryly.

“You want a pat on the butt, play football.” Nolan Lennox turned and walked back to his unmarked car, leaving Orson to join the search team and find out who knew what about Joe Stevens. As lead investigator on the Joseph Stevens case, his dad had bigger fish to fry.

As the shadows lengthened along the Leatherwood Ford Bridge, in the extended dusk that steep valleys and rivers always experience, Nell stood on the shore, hiding beneath a wide-brimmed hat and sunglasses, waiting. Her mother was at her side, with one arm around her waist, body heat a comfort at her back. She wanted to be there when the boaters brought Joe’s boat in.

There were four news vans behind them, all with cameras trained on her, one van for each of the competing networks working out of Knoxville, the closest city big enough to have its own TV stations. NBC, CBS, ABC and the local cable van were all present. Nell had seen her own interview on the air before shutting the TV off. She knew how unlikely it was for reporters to get the details right this early in the search, before they found someone—an unnamed source—to give them the skinny. She wasn’t interested in hearing their on-air misconceptions and mistakes or their take on the search.

Joe’s disappearance had made state news, and some pundits were implying that she had done away with Joe, an implication that should have made Nell furious, but only left her exhausted and more determined than ever not to grant interviews to predatory reporters. After hearing the insinuations on local talk radio, Claire had agreed that they were vultures. She had stepped in to protect her daughter’s privacy, telling reporters to stay back or she would shoot them herself, not that Claire owned a gun. Nell leaned in to her mother’s body as she stared at the empty water, the current only a ripple.

Near 4:00 p.m., the first kayak came into view, followed by the rest of the small craft and then by the Maravia Ranger raft, Mike sitting up high on the stern of the boat. Nell saw them all, but her eyes were on the red playboat being towed by the kayaker in the middle of the pack. It moved in erratic patterns behind the towboat, the lack of weight making it skitter across the surface of the quiet pool like a water spider.

Playboats were used by extreme kayakers who wanted to take class V rapids, and then do tricks and stunts in them. The responsive little boats required the weight and experience of a skillful paddler inside to track smoothly. Empty, Joe’s boat had no grace or style or spirit. Nell had an instant of memory—Joe in the boat, practicing a backflip, his body and boat in the air, upside down, churning water below him, his paddle spinning, a wide grin on his face.

She quivered with reaction. Her husband wasn’t dead. He was alive. He had to be. He was too vital, too vibrant to be…to be dead. Tears started to fall again.