Chương 3
Victoria laughed again, softer this time.
“I’m not going anywhere. Have you looked outside?”
The night manager glanced toward the windows despite himself.
Ruiz did not.
She spoke into her radio and requested medical staff, then asked Ethan whether he wanted law enforcement contacted.
“Yes.”
Victoria’s head came up.
“Ethan.”
He did not look at her.
“Yes.”
Ruiz nodded to the younger officer.
The night manager started to say something about road closures.
Ruiz cut him off.
“Call anyway.”
The officer stepped into the hallway.
Victoria stood.
Ruiz immediately raised one hand.
“Please sit back down.”
“I need to speak privately with my husband.”
“No.”
Ethan answered before Ruiz could.
Victoria’s jaw tightened.
“There are things Noah should not hear.”
Ethan shifted the boy higher on his hip.
“That concern arrived late.”
A woman from the resort’s medical team arrived carrying a red bag. Her gray hair was braided down her back, and she had to remove wet snow from her shoulders before kneeling beside Noah.
Her name was Janice. She asked him whether he had hit his head, whether his fingers tingled, whether the door had closed on any part of his body.
Noah said no to everything.
When she asked whether his arm hurt, he hesitated.
Ethan felt his stomach drop.
“Which arm?”
Noah touched the place Victoria had grabbed.
Janice examined it.
Finger-shaped redness had already begun showing faintly beneath the skin.
Victoria looked away.
Janice’s mouth tightened.
“I’d like to document that.”
“Do it,” Ethan said.
The night manager murmured something to Ruiz about preserving security footage.
Victoria heard him.
She looked toward the hallway.
Ethan saw that too.
“What footage?”
Nobody answered immediately.
He turned to Ruiz.
“What footage?”
Ruiz said, “There are cameras in the corridor and service areas. Not inside guest rooms.”
“Can you pull tonight?”
“Yes.”
Victoria stood again.
“Ethan, please.”
Ruiz stepped between them.
“Mrs. Hale.”
“You don’t understand what you’re about to start.”
Ethan finally looked at her.
“Then tell me.”
She did not.
“Tell me right now.”
Victoria looked at Noah.
Ethan moved him farther behind his shoulder.
Her eyes returned to Ethan.
“I can’t.”
Something inside him changed at the word.
For three years he had lived with uncertainty that everybody politely called grief.
Mara’s car had gone through a guardrail on a narrow mountain road thirty miles from this resort. Search crews found the vehicle two days later in a ravine after a thaw allowed them to reach it. There had been blood inside. Mara’s handbag. Her coat. Her phone. One shoe.
No body.
The working theory had been that she had climbed out injured, tried to reach the road, and been swept into the river.
They searched for sixteen days.
Dogs. Helicopters. Volunteers. Dive teams when the water calmed.
Nothing.
The sheriff had used the phrase presumed deceased after six months.
Ethan had signed paperwork one signature at a time because doing several pages together made him sick.
He had explained death to a three-year-old.
He had packed Mara’s clothes.
He had spent nights sitting on the bathroom floor so Noah would not hear him cry.
And Victoria had been there for almost all of it.
At first as Mara’s friend.
Then as his.
Eventually as something else.
“I can’t,” she said again.
Ethan heard himself ask, “Were you with her?”
Victoria’s eyes flickered.
That was answer enough.
He nearly put Noah down.
Some physical instinct wanted both hands free.
Instead he held the boy tighter.
Ruiz saw the change in him.
“Mr. Hale.”
“I’m fine.”
“You’re not.”
“No.”
He looked at Victoria.
“No, I’m not.”
Janice finished photographing Noah’s arm with Ethan’s permission and asked whether there was another room where she could examine him away from the broken glass.
Ruiz nodded.
“There’s a conference room across the corridor.”
Ethan carried Noah out.
He did not turn around when Victoria called his name.
The conference room had once been part of the suite when the resort opened in 1928. Someone had later installed modern recessed lighting without removing the carved ceiling. The result was a room that looked as if two centuries had agreed not to argue.
Noah sat on the long walnut table while Janice checked his pulse and listened to his breathing.
Ethan stood close enough that their knees touched.
“You want your coat?” he asked.
Noah shook his head.
“Water?”
Another shake.
“Hot chocolate?”
Noah considered this.
“Not from here.”
For some reason that nearly broke Ethan.
“Okay.”
Janice finished.
“Physically, he looks okay. The arm will probably bruise. If he develops dizziness, vomiting, trouble breathing, unusual sleepiness, anything like that, we need to know.”
“Thank you.”
Noah looked at her red medical bag.
“Do you have Band-Aids?”
Janice smiled.
“I have enough Band-Aids to repair a small airplane.”
Noah touched his arm. “I don’t have blood.”
“You are correct.”
He thought about it.
“Can Captain Brown have one?”
Janice produced a blue bandage.
Noah carefully wrapped it around the stuffed dog’s bent ear.
It was the first ordinary thing that had happened in nearly twenty minutes.
Ethan watched him do it.
Across the corridor, voices rose briefly inside the suite, then dropped again.
Noah did not seem to notice.
“Dad?”
“Yeah?”
“Is Mom alive?”
Ethan sat beside him.
His first impulse was to lie.
The impulse was so immediate that it frightened him.
He wanted to say no because no was a known pain. No had routines. No had a grave marker in a family cemetery without a body beneath it. No had anniversaries and photographs and an explanation a child could survive.
Maybe was a different kind of weapon.
“I don’t know.”
Noah looked at him.
“But she said.”
“I know.”
“Victoria knows.”
“Maybe.”
Noah frowned. “She does.”
Ethan rubbed his mouth.
“You’re right. She knows something.”
“Why did she put me in there?”
“I don’t know that either.”
“She was mad.”
“Did you hear her talking to somebody?”
Noah’s gaze dropped to Captain Brown.
May you like
Ethan stopped.
He heard Ruiz’s voice in his head though she had never said the words: Don’t question a frightened child until you turn his memories into your questions.
