Secret Baby, Second Chance

“There were two instructors and eight junior climbers. Although we were amateurs, the Devil’s Peak is so difficult, we had to have a high level of expertise before we could be included in the team. Although I was only eighteen, and the youngest member of the group, I had been part of the club since I was thirteen. I’d done some tricky climbs and Rick Sterling, the lead instructor, was my mentor. He had partnered me on several tricky climbs and he decided I was qualified enough to join this one.” Beth tried out a smile. “I was so excited when he said I could go along. In hindsight, I wish he’d told me to stay at home.”

“I don’t know much about these things, but I know the Devil’s Peak is a beast of a climb,” Vincente said. “I read an article not so long ago rating it one of the top ten hardest in the country.”

“It’s a killer.” Beth winced as she said the words. “Climbing the Peak was always going to involve an overnight stay. We started out hiking through the alpine meadows at the base, then it became like a rocky moonscape before we had to tackle a vertical notch known as the Keyhole. The drop-offs from there were like nothing I’d ever seen. It was vertigo-inducing. We were about halfway up when, without warning, the weather changed. We were caught in a snowstorm. The wind was lashing around us and more snow was whipping off the surrounding peaks. We were completely exposed. Halfway up a dangerous rock face with nowhere to go.”

“Surely your instructors had checked the weather conditions before you set off?” Vincente asked.

“They had. This was totally unexpected. And it was one of the recommendations that came out of the inquiry that followed. Now, climbers are warned that the weather on the Devil’s Peak can change in minutes and that forecasts are not always accurate. We didn’t have the benefit of that warning.”

“So you had to choose whether to go up or down?”

“We chose to keep going.” There had been no right or wrong choices. The only decision had been to keep moving in one direction or another. Beth recalled the tension as, blinded by the snow in their faces and buffeted by the wind, they had continued with the climb. Rick had reasoned that, once they reached the next plateau, they could set up camp as planned. “Physically, and mentally, it was the most challenging thing I’ve ever done. Clinging on to the rock while the wind tried to drag me off set every muscle screaming in agony. After a few hours, my arms and legs felt like Jell-O. My brain was mush, I can’t remember having a single coherent thought during that time. We were almost at the top when one of the group fell. His name was Cory Taylor and, after the instructors, he was probably the most experienced climber among us. It was at a point when we’d almost reached safety. He should have been okay by then.”

Beth paused, drawing a breath. It had been so long since she’d talked about it. The horrors of that day hadn’t receded in the intervening years, but she’d thought about it less over time. She supposed that was what coming to terms with it meant. It didn’t go away, but she learned to live with it. When the letter arrived, it had brought it all flooding back, of course. In the two years since then, it had resurfaced regularly.

“I know his injuries were bad.” Vincente’s voice was gentle.

“He broke his neck and his back.” She spoke bluntly. There was no other way to tell it. “We were roped together in pairs. When Cory fell, it was only the skill of Rick’s coleader, Tania Blake, that stopped him and his partner plummeting off the rock face and into oblivion.”

She paused, taking a moment to collect her thoughts. Leaning forward, Vincente placed a hand on her knee, and his touch ricocheted through her like a streak of lightning. It was good and bad. Good because it grounded her, reassured her and brought her back to normality. Bad because she felt a resurgence of all the old feelings tingle through her nerve endings...and how wrong was it to feel like that in this situation?

“Between us, we got Cory to the top of the Keyhole. By that time, we were in a full-blown storm. We had no way of getting medical help for Cory. No radio or cell phone signal. Nothing.” Beth covered her face with her hands at the memory. “It was awful. He was in so much pain. I can still hear his screams, still hear him pleading with us to let him die. He kept saying it was what he wanted. It was the most awful sound I’ve ever heard. And we were so helpless. There was nothing we could do. One of the team, Peter Sharp, was a paramedic. He gave Cory painkillers, but they couldn’t even touch the pain he was in. We had pod tents that we were able to get up in spite of the snow, and we took turns to sit with him during the night. I was the one who was with Cory when it happened.”

“When he died?” Vincente asked.

“When he was murdered.”

* * *

Lia woke up right at the point when Vincente was going to suggest Beth needed to take a break anyway. Telling the ten-year-old story was clearly taking its toll on her. Although Vincente had heard a watered-down account from Beth herself several years ago, and had endured the town gossips’ version of events now and then, hearing the details was harrowing. He still wasn’t sure what the “Murder on the Devil’s Peak,” as it had become known in Stillwater folklore, had to do with Beth’s current problems, but he guessed she was leading up to that.

Worry continued to play in a loop as he observed Beth and thought about what she was telling him. Either the incident on the mountainside had some connection to her current state of mind or her problems were out of control. Either way, he was concerned about her.

The story she had told him was worse than he had imagined. He knew she had been on a climb that had ended in danger and the death of one of her companions, but he hadn’t paid attention to the details. That hadn’t been because he was uncaring. It had been because he had believed Beth wanted to put the whole episode behind her. Now he knew she hadn’t done so. He had been shocked by what she’d told him. Beth had lived through a nightmare. Had she ever really recovered from that?

Beth carried Lia down to the kitchen and handed her to Vincente while she fixed her formula. “Although this still feel weird, you have no idea how useful an extra pair of hands is.” After the drama of the last few hours, he was pleased to see her make an attempt at a joke.

“Why didn’t you get yourself a proper guard dog?” he asked as she opened the door and Melon bundled excitedly into the room.

“Melon is a guard dog.” Beth seemed offended on behalf of her pet.

Melon brought Vincente a chewed-up tennis ball and dropped it at his feet in an invitation to a game. When Vincente ignored him, the dog pushed the toy closer with his nose. “I hate to be the one to break this to you, but that is not a guard dog.”

Beth brought the bottle of milk over, and Lia reached out eager hands for it. “She’ll do all the work if you sit down with her,” Beth said.

They moved to sit at the table. “Are you ready to tell me the rest of it?” Vincente asked as Lia leaned contentedly back against his arm, making little gulping noises as she drank the milk.

Her weight on his arm felt right and his heart expanded with the strength of his feelings. He wanted to keep her here in his arms, safe and warm, just like this, forever.

“I don’t know what happened, if that’s what you mean. I was in Cory’s tent with him. The idea was to talk to him, to keep telling him everything was going to be okay. In reality, I’m not sure he even knew there was someone there, let alone that he could understand what we were saying. He was out of his mind with pain. I had my flashlight and my book with me and I was reading to him. Then I felt a blow to my head and I blacked out. Sometime later, the next person came into the tent to sit with Cory. They found I was unconscious with a head wound, and Cory was dead. He had been suffocated. We didn’t know that for sure until the inquest. We thought—hoped, even—that he could have died in his sleep.”

“Did you have any idea who did it?” Vincente asked. Although he was focused on what Beth was saying, part of his mind was on the warm weight of his little girl against his arm. He had started this day not knowing she existed and now having her there felt like the most natural thing in the world. If Beth was right and someone was threatening her, threatening them both...

What he felt for Lia went way beyond the natural protectiveness any normal adult felt toward a child. Within minutes of meeting her, his hard, outer shell had melted, leaving him with a new vulnerability. He had a family to care for now. The thought of anything, or anyone, harming a hair of his daughter’s head had him snarling inside like a tiger. He pressed his cheek against her hair, breathing in the scents of shampoo and baby powder, feeling the hook that connected his heart to hers digging in a little deeper.

He looked up to see Beth watching him. She came within his protective sphere, as well. She always had.

“No. We thought—” she bit her lip as she answered his question “—this sounds awful, but we thought someone had done it as a sort of kindness.”

“A misguided way of ending his misery?” It was a horrible idea, but he understood what she meant.

Beth nodded, tears filling her eyes. “It can’t ever be right to take a life, but anyone who heard his cries couldn’t fail to be moved. The storm was over by then and Rick found a place to get a signal. He called the Stillwater Ranger Service and they sent an emergency team. Once it was known how Cory had died, there was a police investigation, but no one was ever charged with his murder. It got a lot of press attention.”

“Did you bear the brunt of it because you were with him when he died?” Vincente had been out of the country at the time, so he hadn’t seen the news reports.

“Some of it was brutal, suggesting that I knew what happened, that I colluded with the person who killed him, even that I did it. The attention died down eventually.” Beth bit her lip. “But the memories took a lot longer to fade. I couldn’t go rock climbing again after that. I think some of the club members still got together—maybe they do even now—but I couldn’t face seeing any of them. Talking about what happened just seemed all wrong. Anyway, it had started to fade naturally into the background. I still thought about it, but less and less often. Then I got this.”

She reached for the brown envelope that she’d brought downstairs with her. Opening it, she withdrew an old newspaper cutting. It had been written a day or two after Cory’s death. The headline was Climbers’ Death Storm Horror. Whoever had sent it to her had taken a red pen and carefully scratched out the words climber and climbers throughout the text, replacing them instead with the words murderer and murderers.

“When were you sent this?” Lia had drained her bottle and was struggling to be put down. Vincente dredged up a memory of babies and feeding. “Doesn’t she need to be burped or something?”

“No, she’s older now. She’ll be fine.” Lia crawled with surprising agility over to a box of toys. Beth’s eyes followed her and remained on her as Lia settled down to play. “About two years ago.” She returned to his question.

“Why didn’t you tell me at the time?” His earlier anger had given way to a nagging feeling of anxiety. His worries about Beth were growing by the minute, settling in his gut as a physical ache. He had a feeling it wasn’t going to shift any time soon.

She withdrew the other items from the envelope and pushed them toward him. “Because of these. The letter, and the first photograph were sent a month after the newspaper article.”

There were four photographs, all similar to the one that had been left in Lia’s crib, and a short letter. Vincente read the letter first.

Greetings, Murderers,

When you killed Cory Taylor, you took away my life. Now I’ll take yours. One by one. You don’t know who I’ll come for first. You don’t know who’ll be next. Don’t tell. I’ll know if you do, and I’ll come after the ones you love. Enjoy looking over your shoulder. One day, I’ll be there.

“Beth, this is sick, but you can’t let it get to you. You should have gone straight to the police.” Vincente was outraged to think that she’d been living in fear all this time because of this.

He was shaken to the core at what he was seeing and hearing. Beth had run from her life in Stillwater, from him, because of this hateful letter? Part of him wanted to ask why she hadn’t trusted him enough to share what she’d been going through, but the haunted look in her eyes told him all he needed to know. Beth hadn’t been capable of thinking of anything beyond the sheer terror caused by these threats.

Although his initial reaction was to give in to the rage he felt, Vincente knew he had to deal with this differently. Storming out of the house in search of the person who had written those words wasn’t going to help Beth, or protect her and Lia.

Beth was so fragile; any wrong move on his part could tip her over the edge. He had to show her she could trust him. No matter how much he wanted to punch the wall, he had to act with compassion.

“Look at the photographs, Vincente.” Beth lined them up in front of him on the table. “This is a group photograph, taken just before we set off on the climb. We all had a copy of it as a memento of the expedition. This was my copy—” She tapped an unmarked version of the picture with one fingertip before moving along to the next photograph. “And this is the one that was sent to me with that letter. It’s the same photograph, but in this one there is a red X over Cory’s face.”

Vincente could see the pattern that was emerging along the line of photographs. “A month later, I was sent this picture.” Beth pointed to the next photograph. “In this version, there are two red Xs. As well as Cory’s face being crossed out, there is a red X over the face of Andy Smith, one of the other climbers.” She moved on to the next picture. “I got this picture the day before I left Stillwater. Three Xs. This time, the expedition leader, Rick Sterling, has his face crossed out.”

Vincente had a feeling he wasn’t going to like the answer to his next question. “Did you get in touch with Andy and Rick after you received these pictures?”

She lifted her eyes to his face. “I tried, but they are both dead.”

Vincente took a moment to let that information sink in. “What about the police, or anyone else who was on the climb? Did you try to contact them?”

“You saw what the letter says.” Her face was ashen. “Once I heard Andy and Rick were dead, I knew it wasn’t an idle threat. If I’d tried to speak to anyone, I’d have been putting you in danger. The only thing I could do was leave.”

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