The Sound of Rain Read online

  OTHER TITLES BY GREGG OLSEN

  NOVELS

  Just Try to Stop Me

  Now That She’s Gone

  The Girl in the Woods

  Run

  Shocking True Story

  The Fear Collector

  Betrayal

  The Bone Box

  Envy

  Closer Than Blood

  Victim Six

  Heart of Ice

  A Wicked Snow

  A Cold Dark Place

  NONFICTION

  A Killing in Amish Country: Sex, Betrayal, and a Cold-Blooded Murder

  A Twisted Faith: A Minister’s Obsession and the Murder that Destroyed a Church

  The Deep Dark: Disaster and Redemption in America’s Richest Silver Mine

  Starvation Heights: A True Story of Murder and Malice in the Woods of the Pacific Northwest

  Cruel Deception: A Mother’s Deadly Game, a Prosecutor’s Crusade for Justice

  If Loving You Is Wrong: The Shocking True Story of Mary Kay Letourneau

  Abandoned Prayers: The Incredible True Story of Murder, Obsession, and Amish Secrets

  Bitter Almonds: The True Story of Mothers, Daughters, and the Seattle Cyanide Murders

  Bitch on Wheels: The True Story of Black Widow Killer Sharon Nelson

  If I Can’t Have You: Susan Powell, Her Mysterious Disappearance, and the Murder of Her Children

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, organizations, places, events, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Text copyright © 2016 Gregg Olsen

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without express written permission of the publisher.

  Published by Thomas & Mercer, Seattle

  www.apub.com

  Amazon, the Amazon logo, and Thomas & Mercer are trademarks of Amazon.com, Inc., or its affiliates.

  ISBN-13: 9781503941960

  ISBN-10: 1503941965

  Cover design by Jason Blackburn

  For Judy, because she’s a fighter

  CONTENTS

  PROLOGUE

  BOOK ONE BEFORE MY UNRAVELLING

  CHAPTER ONE

  CHAPTER TWO

  CHAPTER THREE

  CHAPTER FOUR

  CHAPTER FIVE

  CHAPTER SIX

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  CHAPTER NINE

  CHAPTER TEN

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  BOOK TWO NEARLY A YEAR AFTER KELSEY WENT MISSING

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO

  CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FORTY

  CHAPTER FORTY-ONE

  CHAPTER FORTY-TWO

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR

  CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE

  CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

  CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN

  CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT

  CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

  CHAPTER FIFTY

  CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PROLOGUE

  I look at my sister and I want to laugh out loud. She stands in her kitchen pouring a really good chardonnay. Her wrists, like her ankles, are perfect. Her fingers slender and adorned with the Tiff—the rock on a platinum hoop that Cy “surprised” her with as an engagement ring a few years ago. I could have had a ring too. I could have had a husband. A child. In that order.

  Now, I have nothing. Literally. Nothing.

  “You can only stay here one night, Nicole,” Stacy says, holding the wine to the light and swirling it like she’s some fucking sommelier. A beautiful one. She’s light, with blond hair and sapphire eyes. I’m darker, with hair that I wish looked like hers in the sunlight. With eyes that are merely brown, not copper.

  I’m sitting on a barstool in her kitchen while she hovers over me. “Right,” I tell Stacy. “One night. That’s all.”

  “Just you. Not your dog. Shelby has to stay in your car.”

  I hate her.

  “That’s fine,” I say, though it really isn’t.

  She finally offers me a glass of wine and I take it. I’d like to guzzle the whole bottle, take some pills, and forget that I’m grateful for all that she’s done for me. She’s like a praying mantis, clutching me in her arms and holding me tight while she eats my head and tells me that she’s doing all she can to “lift me up.”

  “Stacy,” I say as we move out of the kitchen to her Room & Board walnut dining table, the light flashing on our glasses as the sun rides low in the sky, “I know I can beat this. I know I can get my shit together.”

  Stacy lets my words hang in the air while she continues to swirl her wine. It’s a trick. She leaves the gap of silence for me to grovel. But I don’t fall for it.

  Her move.

  “I hate to say this,” she says, “because I’ve never been about judging anyone. That’s not who I am. You know that, Nic; you above all others know that I’ve never, ever been one to judge.”

  Such a liar.

  “I know,” I say into my suddenly empty glass. “I know.”

  “I’ve thought about it.” Her blue eyes roll over me before she looks away. “I think that enabling, you know, stalling the inevitable is only going to hurt your recovery. You needed to hit bottom. That’s what the books say. That’s what your counselor says.” She stops, sips.

  I stay mute because I know her. She’s going to fire a full round at me.

  “You’re still seeing her, aren’t you?”

  I nod. Inside I ask God how it is that this woman in front of me, who has been my best friend since the day she was born, can be so fucking condescending.

  And yes, I think, I’m still seeing my counselor. Like you really care.

  “You have to recover all on your own,” she goes on. “I’ve been reading up while waiting for yoga. Gambling is supposedly a disease. And the choices you’ve been making up to now are all on you and this disease. You can only recover if you hit bottom and know that the only way to daylight is in acknowledging or whatever.”

  “Right.” What else can I say? She has everything and I’ve lost everything. Stacy has the upper hand. The tables have turned. She pretends to be sad, but I know she really loves every minute of this personal waterboarding.

  The odds of our continuing our relationship once I get well are very, very slim.

  “I don’t have any money,” I blurt out in a Tourette’s-like spasm.

  She floats her glass in the air and looks for a coaster (“Arts & Crafts tile, 1914, repurposed as a coaster!”).

  “I couldn’t give you another dime,” she says. “Cy says the Bank of Sonntag is closed.”

  “What will I do?” I ask,
again Tourette’s-like.

  “You will find your way back. I have faith in you. To help you any more than I have would only delay your recovery. The things you’ve done are big. Damaging. Hurtful to all of us. You need to own this. Cy and I agree on this. Besides, we are very busy people and having you here will add a layer of stress to our lives. Stress we don’t need at the moment.”

  I look at the bottle. I feel so diminished just then that I don’t even have the confidence to reach over and pour myself another, let alone smack my sister over the head with it.

  She picks up the bottle, then her glass, and heads for the kitchen.

  I sit still for a second.

  “God, Nic, are you coming? You need to get off the pity pot and help me get dinner going.”

  When she disappears, I get up and drag the jagged edge of the terra-cotta tile coaster over the impeccable matte surface of her dining table. I leave a very good gouge, which I hope she’ll discover the day after I’m gone.

  That night I find myself in Emma’s room. Stacy’s husband, Cy, is out of town pushing Microsoft security products at a tech conference in Bologna, and my sister has given in to little Emma’s insistence that she sleep with her mom in her parents’ bed. The guest room was besieged by painters earlier in the day, so my one bag and I have been banished to the four-year-old’s lair. Queen Elsa from Frozen stares from every corner. I wish I were frozen. That’s it. Frozen like some billionaire with the hope they could bring me back when they’d finally figured out how to stop my compulsive habit.

  I’ve smuggled Shelby into the house, and I know that this is my last night with her. Maybe ever. I don’t know if I will take her to the Humane Society or stand in front of the Safeway and beg for someone to take her home. She’s warm, like a hot-water bottle. I can barely look into her eyes because at the moment she’s the only one truly in my corner. She knows that while the mistakes I’ve made cannot be undone, they don’t define who I am inside. If I look into her soulful brown eyes, I’ll start crying again, and I’m no crier.

  While Elsa and Shelby watch over me, I go through my wallet. My police ID. My frequent winner’s card from the Snoqualmie Casino. My canceled credit cards: Nordstrom, Saks, American Express. I know I should cut them up, but something in the back of my irrational brain tells me that in cutting them up I’d lose even more of who I am.

  Who I was.

  I read one of Danny’s endless stream of letters to me.

  Nicole, I’m sorry for what I’ve done. I’m sorry that I dragged you down with me. I want you to know that. No matter what happens. None of this is your fault. I wish I could hold you again.

  I shred it on the spot, wondering if I should toss it in the air like confetti or flush it down the toilet.

  I think the toilet.

  I hold the Snoqualmie card in my hand and remember the time that all the machines came through when I really needed it. I’d been put on administrative leave at the homicide unit and decided that it was time to remodel the kitchen. Who does that? Someone in deep denial, that’s who. Pending the outcome of an investigation that I was sure wasn’t going my way, I had faced weeks of having no income. I had fallen from grace. The workers that redid my floors were decent young men. They hadn’t deserved the likes of me.

  “I’m sorry,” I told the foreman. “I have a cash-flow issue at the moment.” He was young and I thought I could push him around.

  “I need to be paid,” he said, his features carved in a block of sandstone.

  I can’t.

  “Right,” I said. “Of course. I just don’t have the money.”

  He stepped closer. I couldn’t push him around. Pushing around someone as right as he was, when I was as wrong as I was, wasn’t a winning proposition.

  “You said you did,” he said.

  I stepped back. “That was then.”

  “That was two weeks ago. What do you mean ‘then’? Fifty percent down, the rest on completion. You owe me six thousand five hundred dollars.”

  “I understand your terms,” I told him, “but as I said, you’ll have to wait.”

  He wasn’t going to give me any slack. I could feel it, and I was right.

  “I will give you twenty-four hours,” he said.

  “Then what?” I probed. “Then what will you do?”

  Stone-face said, “I will come here and rip out everything we’ve done.”

  I stared hard at him. “You wouldn’t. You know that I’m a police officer, don’t you?”

  “I know you were a police officer.”

  He got me.

  “Right,” I said. “I was.”

  That night, I had gotten into my car with eighty dollars in my checking account, and I had driven to the casino at Snoqualmie, east of Bellevue. It’s a straight shot on I-90. No stoplights. Just a long expanse of pavement toward the foothills of the Cascades. I knew that I could win, because I hadn’t won in a very, very long time. My chances were good—if I stayed smart, stayed focused. My favorite machine wouldn’t let me down. This was my chance. I could do this. I’d reminded myself over and over that God would take care of me. I was a believer. I prayed. I promised that I would never, ever ask again.

  God had heard all of this before.

  The casino was perpetual Christmastime: lights blinking, happy faces everywhere. Smoke formed a light haze over a couple of players that I recognized, but had never spoken a word to. They sat at their favorite machines, cigarettes dangling from their lips and eyes laser-focused in front of them. I hoped they would lose. I know that isn’t kind, but inside I was sure that there had to be losers in order to be winners. I needed this more than they did.

  My card loaded with my last eighty dollars, I made my way across the floor to a Masterpieces and Double Diamonds machine. I had always liked this one. Its mix of iconic artwork and gemstones was a step up from the Dukes of Hazzard or Tic Tac Dough machines that occupied the people across from me. I was better than that. I’d studied art history before going into law enforcement.

  When I think back at that musing, I realize how I rationalized every little thing that I did.

  I sat there all night. I had to pee. Bad. But I didn’t dare leave my machine. I knew that Mona Lisa would smile on me. And if I stepped away for a single second, she’d get mad. I slowed my heart rate. I was calm. The chrome-plated button was like my police-issued Glock, cool to the touch. Power beyond power. As the early evening morphed to late night, I was inside of my own space, pushing the button, rolling the images of diamonds and rubies and old master artwork at my will. I was up. Rembrandt! Picasso! I was down. I told God that this really would be the last time I’d come to the casino—though in my mind I meant, this casino.

  Not all of them.

  I only broke my concentration one time, when an annoying young woman squealed at her big win four chairs down. God, I wondered, does that mean this row is dead and there’s nothing for me? Don’t you do this to me. Don’t!

  Four hours later I had $6,700. I was on fire. I was the goddess of my row and people gathered around me to revel in my reflected greatness, my aura. I was a magnet. I had something that night. I had done what I had to do. It was a high greater than any I had known. The kind of feeling that pulses with electricity at every sensitive part of your anatomy. I sat on the casino toilet with my money in one hand, at last relieving myself. I squeezed the wad of cash like a foam stress ball while I emptied my bladder.

  I’m a winner. Squeeze. Squeeze. That’s what I am!

  I pulled my car into a spot right next to the door at Walmart in nearby Issaquah. Lucky spot! My high waning some, I scurried through the aisles, loading my cart with toilet paper, soap, and dog food for Shelby. Ten minutes later, the rush was all but gone. I knew exactly what I was doing. I glanced in a mirror by the women’s underwear. I no longer looked like myself. My clothes were dirty. My hair, limp and unstyled. My late mother’s words about my looks came to me then.

  “You aren’t exactly beautiful, but you are memora
ble.”

  Stacy was the pretty one. I was supposed to be the smart one. The memorable one. Now I was pretty sure I was memorable for all the wrong reasons.

  I stocked up at Walmart because, while I would pay that foreman the next day, I’d need the supplies to tide me over as I fell under the spell of my own weakness. I’d go to another casino, a place where no one knew my name, but where everyone occupying a seat in front of a machine knew my kind. The men and women who only unlatch themselves from their chairs when midnight strikes so they can line up at the ATM and withdraw more money they can’t afford to lose.

  A little girl, dark haired and blue eyed, passed by me in that nearly empty Walmart. Her mother, a tweaker with peanut teeth and a rainbow complexion, tugged at the girl to keep her moving.

  Then the girl looked right into my eyes.

  My knees weakened and I grabbed the handle of my cart to steady myself. She wasn’t Kelsey Chase, of course. She could have been her sister. Her twin. I wondered if God had sent that girl and her miserable mother to Walmart to chastise me for lying to him. I wondered if that girl’s appearance at Walmart was there to remind me of the biggest failure of my life.

  Nothing happens by chance.

  As I look up at Elsa in her beautiful, blue-and-silver gown in Emma’s perfect bedroom, a tear threatens to roll from eye but I stop it. I know that I will go lower than I have gone until now but not so low that I won’t survive this. Shelby nuzzles me. I won’t let her sweet nature make me cry. I can’t love anyone. Tomorrow, I’ll get rid of her because she’s a burden. She’d be better off without me.

  Whatever.

  Dogs aren’t allowed in the women’s shelter.

  That’s where I’m going.

  As I close my eyes and feel Shelby’s hot little body against the small of my back, I think about Kelsey Chase like I almost always do. Like I probably always will. She would be four next week if she were still alive. She would be smarter than Stacy’s daughter. She’d never be interested in this Frozen crap. I’m as sure of that as I am that I let Kelsey down. I try to think about something else, but she never lets me. A knife inserts itself into pink, unblemished skin. Red blooms over perfect white, Egyptian cotton sheets. A smear of a darker shade mars the floor.