Chapter Two
Memorial Day weekend
“The intro’s good,” Julian says to me over the phone as I weave along the rural highway in New Hampshire. “I like how you reconstruct what you believe happened on the lake and question your own reliability.”
“I’m not reliable at all,” I say. “I was a baby.”
“You’ve done your research, though. The rest of the podcast can be about deconstructing your assumptions, but you’ll need to ask lots of questions to get to the core of what happened. Keep at it, especially when someone doesn’t want to answer.”
I pull off the highway and onto a long rural road. “No one will want to answer,” I say. “My mother and brother . . . we never talk about what happened.”
“Charlie, you can do this,” Julian says. “Trust me. And if they don’t get angry—enraged, even—there isn’t a story worth telling. CrimeCon’s in September. Let’s aim to have a trailer ready by then.”
I click off the call.
Julian was two years ahead of me at prep school.
Now he’s a producer at the public radio station in Boston where I’ve been stuck working as a production assistant since graduating college four years ago.
Julian’s career trajectory, unlike mine, took off recently, when he developed a six-part series on the Boston Strangler, one that focused less on the gruesome nature of the crimes or the man convicted of committing them, Albert DeSalvo, and more on the lives of his victims. The series did well and got picked up nationally, and when I told Julian about the murder on the lake, he proposed a podcast that I’d host and he’d produce.
“What would it be about?” I asked. “My mother had an affair, and my father killed her lover. It’s pretty clear who the good guys and bad guys were. ”
“There’s always more to tell,” Julian said. “It’s a murder in a small town where everyone knows each other. Besides, no one is all good or all bad. You have to find the right angle. A story like this one can catch on in the true-crime world.”
So, for the last few months, Julian’s worked his network to build interest, while I’ve mapped out how much of my story I know and who to speak with to fill in the gaps.
This morning, I left my apartment in Somerville outside Boston and headed north to New Hampshire, where the whole thing began.
Now, a quarter of a century after my father killed Isaac Haviland and left my mother to die, I’ll start asking questions.
Maybe this project will jump-start my career, too, but what I really want is to learn who my father was before.
That way, I’ll understand who he became.
And why.
I arrive at the end of an overgrown driveway and check the GPS. I’m in the middle of nowhere. I drop a pin and text the location to Julian. If you don’t hear from me in the next fifteen minutes, I write, call in reinforcements.
I hit send and hope the message goes through, then ease onto the driveway.
Two enormous brown dogs trot out of the trees, following along until I reach a tidy farmhouse with pansies spilling from window boxes.
A pair of motorcycles sits beside a shed.
The dogs approach the car window, tails wagging, teeth bared.
Sweet and salty. Which side will they opt for if I open the door?
I tap record on my phone. “Lisa Lawson’s house, Enstone, New Hampshire, twenty miles from the site of Isaac Haviland’s murder.
Lisa is the surviving partner of Wendy Burrows, the lead detective in the homicide investigation.
Detective Burrows died a few months after the trail went cold in the search for my father.
I found Lisa’s name listed in Wendy’s obituary. ”
I crank down the car window an inch. Dog slobber coats the glass. “Are you friendly?” I ask.
One of the dogs whines.
Julian will appreciate the question and the response. It adds texture to the audio.
Behind me, someone taps the glass. I spin around. A woman stands on the other side of the car, pitchfork in hand. She must be well into her seventies, with a mound of silver hair piled on her head. I lean across the car and crack that window open. “Lisa Lawson?” I ask.
“Who’s asking?” the woman says. “And you can’t be lost, because this house is on the way to absolutely nowhere.”
“Charles Kilgore,” I say. “Charlie. I called a few times. No one answered.”
“Do you pick up your phone when you don’t recognize the number?”
I open the car door an inch. The dogs press forward. “Will they bite?” I ask.
“They won’t, but I might.”
I ease out of the car as both dogs leap up to lap me in the face. They’re friendly, in an aggressive, nonconsensual way. “I wish I had treats,” I say.
“You’d never get rid of them,” Lisa says, snapping her fingers so the dogs come to her side. “This one’s Lenny. The other one’s Squiggy. You’re too young to get the reference.”
“Laverne and Shirley,” I say.
“Score one point for the handsome stranger who rides into town. What do you want, anyway?”
“You were married to Wendy Burrows.”
“In another lifetime,” Lisa says. “And we weren’t exactly married. Wendy and I were together long before any of that was legal. And she probably died before you were born.”
“I’m looking into one of her cases. A cold case.”
Lisa takes in my chartreuse cardigan and bowling shirt.
“You can’t possibly be a cop.” Her eyes narrow.
“Charlie Kilgore . . . You’re that baby, Mark’s kid.
I should have known. You look exactly like him.
Same floppy black hair. Same blue eyes. Same skinny ass.
” She glances toward my car. “Same yellow Volvo.”
Yes, my yellow ’83 Volvo sedan is the same car that was parked at Idlewood when my father killed Isaac Haviland.
I found it stored in a shed a few years ago when I needed a free set of wheels, and it started on the first try.
The car has a cassette tape deck, a functioning cigarette lighter, and an interior that reeks of tobacco and pot.
Lately, the asphalt has started to show through the rusted-out holes in the floor.
Now that I’m in New Hampshire and away from the busy streets of Somerville, I’ll find the time to slide under the frame to see what I can patch.
I plan to keep the Volvo until it dies on the side of the road, or at least until I finish recording this podcast. Photos of me behind the wheel will play well in social media posts.
“Could I ask you some questions?” I ask. “It’ll only take five minutes.”
“How about thirty seconds,” Lisa says, “and then you can get the hell out of here. I didn’t know your dad well, but he was supposed to be in Pippin that summer.
I played Berthe. Your father could sing.
Tenor. Beautiful voice.” She puts a hand to her hair, and I swear she blushes.
“But once your father screwed everything up, I had to sing with Whit Entwhistle, who couldn’t hit a single note. ”
Ruining the local musical was hardly my father’s worst crime. “But Wendy, your wife—”
“I told you already, we weren’t married. If we’d been married, I’d have her pension and could afford to get the roof on this house replaced.”
“Wendy was the lead investigator on the Haviland murder.”
“And we were supposed to go camping in Old Orchard Beach the day after Wendy got put on that investigation. I tried to rebook the site, but they were full, and Wendy wound up having to work around the clock anyway. The whole summer was ruined.”
“Did Wendy ever mention my father, or why he did what he did?”
“Nothing worth sharing,” Lisa says. “She was due to retire at the end of that year. Look what happened with that.”
From what I’ve read, Wendy Burrows was either a good cop with a good close rate or a cop who did her best to close cases quickly—I’m not sure which.
What I do know is that she was found in her car at the bottom of the lake.
“She died in the middle of a homicide investigation,” I say. “That’s suspicious, right?”
Lisa swings the pitchfork over her shoulder.
“Wendy was a state detective. She was always in the middle of an investigation. That was her job. What is there to say, anyway? She ended most shifts by drinking a fifth of vodka over on Foss Hill. That night, she hit the gas instead of the brake and drove off the ledge into the lake. It was before they put in the guardrail. With the way she drank, I’m surprised it didn’t happen sooner.
Why are you asking about the Haviland case, anyway?
It’s not like your father wasn’t guilty. ”
“Could he have killed Wendy?” I ask.
“Your father?” Lisa asks. “Only if he came back as a ghost.”
The door to the house opens and a woman steps onto the porch. “Lunch is ready, Lisa,” she says.
“My minder,” Lisa says under her breath. “This one keeps me on a short leash, but they don’t last. I’ll have her out of here within the week.”
The woman approaches. She must be in her early forties, with dark hair tied in a ponytail and sensible shoes. “Can I help you?” she asks.
“We’re fine, Zoe,” Lisa says. “Charlie here’s an old friend.”
“I’m Karen, not Zoe,” the woman says. “You ran Zoe off last month. Why don’t we come inside? I made us some tomato soup.”
“They don’t let me have a grain of salt,” Lisa says to me. “Not a single one. Nothing tastes like anything.” Karen takes her arm, but Lisa shakes her off. “Wendy and I could have spent months camping at Old Orchard Beach without worrying about a thing. Instead, here I am. With Zoe.”
“Karen,” Karen says.
Reception on my phone doesn’t return until I’ve left Lisa Lawson’s house and nearly made it back to the highway. Julian picks up on the first ring. “How’d it go?”
“Dead end,” I say. “She didn’t want to talk. At least, not about the right things.”
“Did she sign a release?”
“I didn’t get a chance.”
“Head back in a few days. Keep working her and get her to sign. You never know where these things might lead. Meanwhile, upload the recording and I’ll see what’s there.”
I click off the call, transfer the recording to my phone, then post the file to the Cloud for Julian.
Ahead, a sign marking the town line for Hero, New Hampshire, appears at the side of the forested road.
I tap record and set the digital recorder on the dashboard.
“Friday, May 22,” I say, practicing my narration.
“Arriving in Hero, twenty-five years later, a tiny town nestled in the foothills of the White Mountains where nothing as spectacular as my father’s epic collapse has ever happened, before or since.
Tonight, we’ll celebrate the start of summer—”
Behind me, blue lights flash as an SUV cruiser hugs my tail. I groan and pull to the side of the road as one of the local cops, Seton Haviland, takes her time exiting the cruiser and sauntering alongside the Volvo in her police uniform.
I should have expected this.