Chapter One
There is one thing I know for sure about the day of the murder: My aunt Hadley wasn’t at Idlewood.
The rest of us were, though—my mother Jane, my brother Reid.
My father Mark, too. Even my father’s old friend Paul Burke, up from New York for the long Memorial Day weekend, had paddled to our dock from the next cove.
As the sun edged behind the foothills surrounding the lake, the adults toasted the start of summer with gin and tonics.
“Where’s the rest of the gang?” Paul asked. “Isaac? How about Andrea?”
My mother glanced at my father, who stared out over the water.
Paul must have sensed the underlying tension between my parents as he polished off his cocktail and swung into the red canoe to leave.
“It’s my fault they’re keeping to themselves,” he said.
“I bailed Isaac out with the whole restaurant thing, and he’s been avoiding me ever since.
I told him that dump was a bad investment.
Still is.” He shoved away from the dock and paddled out of the cove.
“The restaurant was a bad idea,” my father said to my mother. “You should know better than I.”
He transferred the cocktail glasses to a tray and headed toward the house, avoiding stones and exposed tree roots along the path.
My mother lingered on the dock, probably grateful for a respite from my father’s brooding silence as she set up the paper lanterns for the festival that started at sunset.
Idlewood was an old family camp on Hero Lake in New Hampshire that my mother had inherited from her father two years earlier.
It sat on an island connected to the mainland by a long, narrow footbridge.
In those days, we used an outhouse and piped water from the lake.
Even now, we cart what we need over in wheelbarrows.
Inside the cabin, my father finished making the Bolognese that had been simmering on the old gas stove all afternoon.
Wearing a pink apron that read Twin Delights, he chopped parsley into a fine mince.
A copy of Gourmet magazine lay open in front of him.
At the kitchen table, my twelve-year-old brother, Reid, labored over his math homework, mumbling under his breath as he struggled through an algebra proof.
My mother eventually left the dock and came up to the house, where she busied herself by setting the table on the porch for dinner.
In the kitchen, she peered out a window, through the trees and across the water toward the parking area on shore, where my father’s yellow Volvo sedan stood out among the birch trees.
Late evening sun shone off the water while the first loon of the season cried.
Since my parents had only opened the cabin that morning, fishing poles and the winter’s cobwebs spanned the rafters over our heads. On the CD player, Janet Jackson sang.
I lay in a bassinet tucked in the corner of the kitchen, so most of these details come from what I’ve pieced together as I’ve researched the day’s events. Some of them, I’ve filled in with my imagination.
My father blew on a spoonful of Bolognese and carried it to my mother, who still hovered by the kitchen window. “Taste,” he said.
I wonder if he meant the small kindness as a peace offering.
My mother relented. “Delicious.”
“Happy summer,” my father said.
“Let’s hope.”
My father would have been thirty-four then, two years younger than my mother, whom he’d met at a Hero Lake Junior Association dance when they were both teenagers.
He was an accountant at my mother’s construction firm and wore glasses and had the slender build of a cyclist. He hiked and performed with the local summer stock theater, and was busy rehearsing to play the lead in Pippin.
Unlike my mother, his image at that age is fixed in my mind.
I have a photo of him pressed between the pages of a rarely used thesaurus, a photo that ran in the local papers afterward, one that stares back at me with my own blue eyes.
He returned to the stove, while my mother checked the landline for the beep of a voicemail, even though the phone hadn’t rung since we’d opened the cabin. She distracted herself by lifting me from the bassinet, holding me over her head, and calling me “Charlie Bear” until I laughed.
Through the trees came the roar of an engine, followed by the pop of a stone beneath a tire.
My mother returned me to the bassinet, then touched the curly blond hair that fell around her shoulders and checked her reflection in a mirror.
A moment later, a black pickup truck slid in beside the Volvo.
Isaac Haviland got out of the cab and came to the shoreline on the other side of the footbridge.
“I thought you told him to stay away,” my father said.
“Mark, please,” my mother said. “I’ll take care of it.”
My father kept the apron on and the chef’s knife in hand as he went out onto the wraparound porch with my mother trailing behind.
Isaac Haviland stood on the opposite shore with his fists on his hips.
He was tall and sturdy, with dark hair and a heavy beard.
He wore a flannel shirt open to a white T-shirt. He shielded the sun with a hand.
“Jane,” Mr. Haviland called across the water, “talk to me.”
My mother touched my father’s arm, but he shrugged her off, and she watched from the porch as he headed down the path, disappearing into the trees and onto the footbridge.
A moment later, he reappeared on the shoreline.
The two men were far enough away that my mother couldn’t make out their words, but not so far that their anger didn’t permeate the evening air.
The hinges on the screen door groaned as Reid joined my mother. She ran her fingers through his silky blond hair.
On the shore, my father shoved Mr. Haviland.
“I thought they were friends,” Reid said.
“They are,” my mother said. “But even old friends have rough patches. And I should make sure they don’t make things worse.”
Reid clung to her as though he knew what would happen next. “Stay,” he said.
My mother cupped his cheek in the palm of her hand. “There’s nothing to worry about. I’ll take care of this. You keep an eye on Charlie Bear.”
She extricated herself from Reid’s embrace. By then, the sun had begun to set behind the foothills surrounding the lake. She passed through a thicket of blueberry bushes and brambles, and when she emerged onto the shore, she kept her voice light. “What are you boys getting into?”
On the porch, Reid sensed both men had calmed in her presence, enough so that he went into the kitchen and lifted me from the bassinet.
He balanced me on his shoulder and cooed in my ear as he returned to the porch and watched the three adults through the trees.
My father’s shoulders had softened as he and Mr. Haviland spoke for a few moments.
Finally, Mr. Haviland opened the door to the pickup truck, as if to leave.
Then he turned to my mother, eyes closed.
Later, Reid would tell the police officer, “Mr. Haviland looked like he wanted to kiss my mother. I think he called her my love.”
My father flicked his wrist, a move so subtle that Reid barely noticed the flash of steel in the fading light.
My mother waved her arms and screamed in our direction.
Red, lots of red, bloomed from Mr. Haviland’s white T-shirt.
He clutched at his stomach. My father held my mother by her curls with one fist, and the bloodstained knife with the other.
She clawed at his face, twisting her foot around his until they collapsed to the ground, blood oozing from where my father had slashed at her face and hands with the knife.
The sun slid behind a hill. The whole world seemed to stop in that instant, as day turned to night and brilliant color faded to shades of gray.
Reid’s feet were rooted to the porch. I wonder what he might choose to do now if he could relive this moment.
I wonder if he’s spent a lifetime asking how this day could have turned out differently had he run toward danger.
I started to cry.
That sound—a baby’s wail—bifurcated our world into a before, when we had a family, and an after, where our father’s choices have haunted us.
Around the lake, lights flickered. One by one, paper lanterns illuminated the darkness and lifted up off docks and into the night like tiny hot-air balloons.
On the shore, my mother fought to wrest control of the knife.
Blood coated her hands. My father hurled her to the ground.
She grappled for his leg as he lunged toward the island, those blue eyes burning with rage.
He was coming for us next.
“We should run,” Reid said.
I suppose he was talking to me.