The Hive Read online

  The best kind of cake.

  The kind that keeps people foolishly going back for more.

  Even when they ought to know better.

  Carson was a beautiful little girl. Renae knew that was true because she’d been told so repeatedly by her mother, her sister, and all her friends. Even strangers at the Haggen market at the base of Sehome Hill. Yes, Carson had big brown eyes and lashes that almost tickled onlookers from across the room. But beautiful? Renae couldn’t quite see her that way. She looked at the baby as she cried all night and screamed all day, and wondered how this child had ever been a part of her.

  And him.

  Him. The baby’s father. Kirk Lane’s devotion had proven elusive to Renae even months before she gave birth.

  “I’ll be there for you, babe,” he’d said.

  Liar!

  As her belly grew to a Jiffy Pop roundness, so did her disdain for Kirk. His teeth were oddly small. His eyes seemed dull, almost cloudy, like those of an old dog on his last ride to the veterinarian’s windowless side room, where pet owners huddle, lean over their animal, and cry goodbye. Kirk even had a peculiar odor about him that started to turn her stomach in her second trimester.

  Renae named her daughter Carson, a family name. The funny thing, some noticed, was that she almost never used it. It was always she or the baby, and once or twice, she found herself referring to Carson as it.

  One time her mom noticed her doing so.

  “Renae!”

  “What?” she said, though she knew she’d been caught again doing that weird thing she’d done since she brought Carson home from the birthing center. It had just slipped out as she’d been numbly multitasking her way through another interminable conversation with her mother.

  Now she’d have to pay for it.

  When at last Renae lifted her eyes from her phone, where she’d been scrolling through job postings, holding on to the hope that a change of employment would snap her out of the funk that had overtaken her life, she found her mother looking at her with those same eyes that had tricked her into the motherhood club.

  “Renae, is everything okay, honey? You seem . . . I don’t know . . . a little distant.”

  “I don’t know, Mom,” she said. “I don’t know why I feel the way I do about it.”

  “But . . . it, honey? Her name is Carson. Your baby has a name.”

  “Right,” Renae said. “That’s her name. I know she’s my baby, but, Mom . . .” Her words trailed off into tears.

  Renae’s mother got up and placed her hand on her daughter’s shoulder. “Honey, you need to get yourself together. Carson is yours. Just like you are mine.”

  Wrong thing to say.

  The exchange didn’t help one little bit. Stating the obvious didn’t move her. Simple made sense, but not now, in the complexity of what she knew to be postpartum depression, a black hole that drew her downward from the moment her eyelids rose to wakefulness.

  As she shoved the stroller through the trail’s gummy mud, Renae chewed her lower lip and held back the words that circulated through her brain. Something is terribly wrong with me. A baby is forever. Until eighteen, at least. Or, please, until the medication her psychiatrist had prescribed kicked in. But when would that be? She ate the pills the way she ate bunches of the stuck-together jelly beans her mom kept in an uncovered dish on her glass-topped coffee table.

  I should have gotten a dog. I shouldn’t be a mom. I don’t even feel like Carson’s mine, or that I even like her. I’m the worst mother the world has ever known.

  She stopped the stroller at the edge of the ravine and looked downward as the falls sent spring runoff into the deep channel of the Nooksack River. Pondering how she was going to survive, what she was going to do.

  What she should do.

  With effort, she allowed herself just then to believe that the medication had, after all, begun to make her feel better. Far from 100 percent, but the new dosage, she hoped, was moving in the right direction. Carson stirred, and she looked down at the brown-eyed baby. The roar of the water seemed to calm her, much like the sound of the Dyson when Renae ran it next to the crib in the nursery she had yet to completely decorate, vinyl appliqués of rabbits and badgers still to be affixed to freshly painted walls. Then Carson’s brow puckered, precursor to yet another meltdown, and Renae tore the pacifier from her fanny pack, bent down, and thrust it between the startled baby’s lips. After a moment of silence, Carson started making that irritating sucking sound.

  Anything was better than another round of caterwauling, though.

  The young mother stared at the waterfall, wondering now if she was getting better or if that flash of hope was another false promise. The answer gained weight in the back of her skull. Storm warning.

  She recalled the words of her friends and relatives: “You don’t know love until you are a mother, and that’s a fact.”

  Renae’s hands gripped the stroller. She started to ease it forward, timidly, toward the edge of the ravine, which opened wide like a granite and earthen jaw. Her hands felt moist, her brow soaked. Her heart raced.

  She pushed the stroller a few inches farther. She would keep pushing. She would follow the stroller down.

  It would be over.

  As she gathered her nerve, her eyes latched on to a chalky figure below.

  Is it real? Or some kind of prank?

  Whatever it was, it snapped her out of what she was going to do.

  Down by the falls, slumped on the mossy bank, was what appeared to be a human body. A woman. Naked. Legs akimbo. Pale. Wet. Dead.

  Renae let out a gasp and pulled back. She released her fingers from the stroller. Her racing heart was now hammering. She found it hard to breathe. She moved closer to get a better view and looked around to see if anyone was nearby.

  She was within a cave of evergreens. Stony quiet, save for the sound of the water as it cascaded down into the bottom of the ravine.

  Except for the naked, ghostly pale woman below her, she was alone. She felt it in her bones. This was the kind of place where one could surely count on solitude.

  It had been the reason she’d come here.

  She jammed the cord of her earbuds into her phone and pressed three digits.

  “I think I found a body,” she told the 911 dispatcher.

  Carson started to cry.

  “I need to hold my baby,” Renae said. “Just a minute.”

  She didn’t need to stop talking to the operator. Her hands were free. But she needed the time. And as she’d said, she needed to hold her baby. She reached down, fiddled with the pesky safety straps, and gently lifted Carson from the stroller. She was warm, and only a little fussy. Renae rocked her a bit, that jiggly way that her mother had shown her. Carson stopped her halfhearted fussing at once, and mother’s and daughter’s eyes met in that unmistakable way that communicates more than just want.

  “You still there?”

  “Yeah,” Renae said. She told the operator where she was, what she could see, then promised to wait for the police to arrive. “I’ll wait. I’ll be here.”

  Her baby held against her with both arms, Renae kept her gaze locked on the lifeless figure more than a hundred feet down. Suddenly, life seemed so fragile, so precious. Certainly, death would end the pain that had consumed her since her baby was born. But death was final. It was absolute. There was no turning back. No second-guessing.

  Had that girl down on the rocks come there with the same idea?

  Had she still been convinced during her fall?

  Or had she, as Renae had at that very moment, changed her mind?

  And fallen, anyway.

  CHAPTER 2

  Lindsay Jackman managed to breathe. Somehow. Her hands gripped the wheel and her heart raced as her mind fought to stay on task. The call that morning and the warning from her lieutenant left her angry, heartbroken, and confused.

  “You’re too close to him,” Martin Madison said, his voice low but emphatic. “I’m working the scen
e.”

  “I’m coming.”

  “You can’t.”

  “He’s my partner.”

  “We have a body at Maple Falls. Dispatch will update.”

  As she pulled out of the lot at the Ferndale Police Department, the dispatcher repeated the location. Lindsay felt the presence of the empty passenger seat beside her.

  Phantom limb.

  She’d been trying to compartmentalize the numbness that comes with sudden and nonsensical loss. Earlier that morning, the wife of her partner of nearly a decade had found his body behind a curtain of car exhaust, at the wheel of his SUV, in their garage.

  Once she’d absorbed the blunt facts, her mind set to cycling pointlessly through the same thoughts.

  Goddamn you, Alan!

  How could you do this to me?

  To Patty? To Paul?

  Lindsay shifted her thoughts back to the dispatcher as she drove out toward Maple Falls, on the North Fork of the Nooksack, a river running along the Mount Baker Highway, south of the Canadian border.

  “Woman says she found what she thinks is a body at the base of the falls. Scared. Not sure. Probably nothing. You know the falls, Detective?”

  “Kids are always messing around out there,” Lindsay said, ending the call with a request for some backup.

  The Nooksack’s waters emanated from a melting glacier in the Cascades, and it flowed rapidly, almost milky white, then softer and clearer as it lazily eased into Bellingham Bay. One of its showiest spots was Maple Falls, a hundred-foot drop that saw a good number of visitors in the summer and on weekends. Weekdays, especially after the Labor Day rush, not so much. It wasn’t Niagara, that’s for sure. More of a destination for locals than for the tourist looking to be dazzled, although drunk selfie takers had found purpose and met their ends at the location. Three had fallen to their deaths over the past five years. One kid from Canada managed to survive only to spend the rest of his days taking selfies in a wheelchair.

  That the spot was dangerous, of course, was its lure. When the brochure Discover Whatcom! was released by Bellingham Whatcom County Tourism that year, the falls weren’t even mentioned—for safety’s sake.

  By that time, the omission didn’t matter. No one read Discover Whatcom!, anyway. Social media owned the promotion of anything worth doing.

  Or, apparently, worth dying for.

  Lindsay was driving from the police department in Ferndale, thinking about the latest stupid tragedy and how such incidents only brought more people to test their daredevil picture-posing prowess. The landscape was a green blur as she zipped along the river. No lights. No sirens. No need.

  A body. A woman’s.

  She looked once more at the empty passenger seat.

  “Probably a local showing off for some friends,” Alan would have said.

  “You always think that,” she’d have offered after a prolonged beat.

  “Well, I’ve been right all of my life. You know that, Lindsay. You’ve seen me in action.”

  He’d have grinned those bright-white choppers and waited for her purposely feeble retort.

  It had been a game of theirs, a teasing give-and-take between two people who work closely on a job that requires such a personal bond.

  Alan Sharpe had occupied a space somewhere between father figure and best friend. His suicide, she knew, would haunt her forever, in part because she didn’t see it coming.

  She hadn’t known how fragile he was, how a deep-seated hurt lurked behind his ready smile. He was devoted to his family and his work. Sometimes when Lindsay arrived at the office they’d shared, she wondered if Alan had even gone home the night before. She had stopped asking about it because he always denied it—even after she’d found a pillow and a blanket in the lateral file cabinet next to his desk.

  And yet he had always smiled. He’d never acted sad. Not even a little.

  The detective’s tires crunched the jagged-edged gravel as she drove up in her county-issued SUV and parked alongside a Toyota sedan, the only other vehicle in the small lot. A young woman with a baby in her arms was waiting next to it.

  “Ms. Jones?” Lindsay said, getting out.

  “That’s me,” the woman answered. “Renae.”

  “Are you two all right? I know discoveries like this can be very traumatic. And I see you have your hands full.” Lindsay smiled at the baby.

  “I’m going to be fine,” Renae said. “But I need to take Carson home. She’s going to need to nap.”

  “Understood. Let’s take a walk down the trail, and you can tell me about what you saw. It won’t take long, but I need to make note of what you found, how you found it. Coroner and techs are on the way.”

  “It’s down there,” Renae said, indicating with her eyes. “She’s down there. Under the falls.”

  “Right, but I need you to show me,” Lindsay said. “Can we put your stroller in your car? No sense horsing it down that trail.” Though Lindsay could see its wheels were already caked with mud. What had this woman been thinking?

  She helped Renae put the stroller into the trunk of the Toyota, then watched as she pulled a baby carrier from the back seat and strapped the child into it.

  “It won’t take long,” Lindsay said again as Renae hoisted the carrier onto her back. “Just tell me everything you heard and saw. Tell me when you got here, why you came, just the basics for my report.”

  Renae snapped the buckles of the carrier into place and led the detective down the muddy trail.

  “I came out here maybe an hour ago. I like it here. Quiet. Kind of lonely. I don’t know, I thought it was peaceful. Just needed a break.”

  “How old is she?”

  “Carson is six months,” she said. “Almost seven.”

  “She’s beautiful.”

  Lindsay saw Renae’s slight, sad smile dissolve as they drew closer to the falls. She could hear the water as it started its dive one hundred feet to the rounded rocks below. Light seeped in through the maple trees that arched over the trail before giving way to the dark cavern of the Douglas firs and the weeping forms of the western hemlocks. The sunny circles of light that illuminated the path faded as they approached the precipice that was the primary overlook.

  “You were out here all by yourself?” Lindsay asked.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did you see anyone?”

  “No.”

  Renae adjusted a strap from the baby carrier, wincing as it dug into her thin frame. “I’ve never seen anything like this,” she said. “Really. You know, just something I wished I’d never seen.”

  Lindsay nodded, gave the young woman’s elbow a gentle squeeze. There was nothing else to say.

  As they walked closer to the roar of the falls, Lindsay noted how the ruts of the stroller and prints from Renae’s muddy shoes had marked the sodden trail. No other footprints. She knew her partner would have lamented the rainfall the night before, erasing tracks, washing away evidence. She found herself thinking those very thoughts in Alan Sharpe’s voice.

  Her phone pinged and she looked down, a quick, bruising glance.

  Patty wants small memorial on the 17th. Damn suicide. She’s a mess.

  Lindsay swallowed and went back to the business at hand.

  Renae stayed a few steps from the edge of the ravine. She didn’t need another look.

  “Down there.” She pointed. “To the right.”

  Lindsay held her breath and took in the scene below. It was as if the falls were a long, misty ribbon, pointing to the place where the dead woman’s body lay.

  The dead woman was nude.

  There were no signs of any clothing.

  This wasn’t likely a suicide, but there was no way of really knowing that right then, and guessing was never a good idea at the start of an investigation. Collecting the evidence, finding out who the woman was, how she died, and tracing her steps—all of that had to be done before any games of supposition. Games that Alan had been adept at, frequently uncannily so.

  Whi
ch means exactly nothing now.

  CHAPTER 3

  A couple of Ferndale officers arrived to secure the scene, and a few minutes later, two of the county’s crime techs, Tim and Tam, trudged forward to help with the most crucial part of the investigation: gathering evidence.

  Lindsay and the techs started the climb down a switchback to the body.

  “My mom walks the beach on Lummi,” Tamara Oliver said as they made their way down. “I always kind of cringe inside that she’ll be the one to find a foot or a body washed up from the straits. Despite what I do for a living, my mom can’t take the sight of a speck of blood.”

  “You sure she’s your mom?” Tim Arthur said.

  “That’s what the evidence suggests,” she said. “Maybe you don’t understand because you grew up in a family of doctors and paramedics, Tim. Blood and guts was dinner-table talk for your people.”

  “The family business,” Tim said, with a toothy grin.

  Lindsay felt a pang, listening to the two of them. They had the same kind of teasing relationship that she and Alan had had.

  As if she’d read her thoughts, Tam said, “Really sorry about Alan, Lindsay.”

  News of tragedies among their ranks traveled at lightning speed.

  “Yeah,” she answered. “He was one of the good ones, for sure.”

  A light mist hung over the chasm by the time the trio reached the bottom and made their way to the figure that Renae Jones had seen that morning.

  The acrid smell of a decomposing body met them when they were twenty feet away.

  The body was facedown. Ashy white. Smudges of dried, coagulated blood that were more bronze than red streaked her back like tiger stripes. The body was in bad shape, though possibly preserved some with the cold water that encircled it. Lindsay took photos with her phone for reference, and the techs moved methodically over the body, capturing images and diagramming the scene. Lindsay noted red marks along the upper back to her neck, exposed by the part in the victim’s black hair.