Chapter Fourteen
The crowd in the pub swirls around me as I stare at the empty stool where my father sat not thirty seconds ago.
In the background, Freya Faith sings “Landslide,” while Seton stands guard by the entrance.
As if in slow motion, I get up and dash outside.
On the street, a wave of people surges at me, shoving forward to escape the heavy rain.
I force my way through them until I reach the middle of the road, asphalt shining under the streetlamps, and search every direction for that ponytail.
Off in the distance, a motorcycle engine roars.
My father’s gone.
I tap record on my phone. “I saw him,” I say, my breathing heavy. “My father sat beside me at the bar. We talked for, I don’t know, five minutes.” As the words form, doubt creeps into my mind as it has before, eroding the certitude that propelled me out here to the street.
“It was him,” I say.
I know it was him.
I step toward the pub and hold the phone close.
I want to capture the patter of the rain and the music in the background.
This time, I speak slowly and deliberately.
“Mark Kilgore, my father, was at the Landing in downtown Hero, New Hampshire. He drank a beer. He talked to me about friendship. He called me by my name.” I pause, trying to remember his exact words.
“He said he was here visiting an old friend, someone he was worried about.”
Someone such as Andrea Haviland, a friend who nearly died today. Could Julian have been onto something when he talked about the past folding in on the present? Because my father appearing out of nowhere on the day of the Burkehaven fire can’t be a coincidence.
Back inside, Seton still stands guard by the doorway.
“You look like you saw a ghost,” she says.
I search her face for a sign she saw what I saw, that she understands who was here tonight. But why would Seton recognize my father, especially when his appearance has changed so much? “That man sitting next to me at the bar—”
“Ponytail. Glasses.”
“You saw him?”
“Of course I saw him. I’m trained to notice these things.”
“Did you recognize him?” I ask.
“Never seen him before.”
I nearly tell her who he was but stop myself. Seton would welcome a long-shot suspect to clear her mother of the arson charges, so I need to be one hundred percent certain before I say anything.
“What are you doing here anyway?” I ask. “I thought you’d be at the hospital.”
“There’s no change in Mom’s condition,” Seton says. “No arrest yet, either. I’ll catch a few hours of sleep before heading back.”
“Are we friends again?” I ask.
She folds her arms across her chest. “Check with me tomorrow.”
“There’s an empty seat at the bar. We don’t need to talk, especially if we’re not friends till tomorrow.”
Seton barely shakes her head. “Let me stew in my own misery.”
“You know where I am,” I say.
At the bar, Blancy hasn’t had a chance to clear the pint glass my father used.
I wrap it in a paper napkin and slip it under my coat.
There could be fingerprints on it. Or DNA.
I doubt my father’s fingerprints are on record, and I’m certain his DNA isn’t, but I have my own DNA.
If I arrange a test of what’s on the glass, there could be a parental match, and I’ll finally know what’s real and what isn’t.
“Did your friend take off?” Blancy asks as he wipes down the counter.
“Does he come here much?”
“Not before tonight, though lots of people are passing through for the long weekend. If he’s staying local, we’re the only game in town. Come back tomorrow and bring your brother with you.”
I’m not sure what Reid would do if he saw our father stroll into the Landing.
Blancy pours me another IPA, then moves down the bar, seeing to other customers.
He grew up in this town but could only have been ten or twelve when the murder happened.
In fact, most of the people at the Landing tonight are too young to remember Mark Kilgore even if they have heard about the murder, so my father could have come here without expecting to be recognized.
Except . . . except Paul was at the Landing tonight, if only briefly.
And Paul would recognize my father, no matter how much my father had changed.
Something cold and wet brushes along my hand. I jump, only to find Freya Faith’s German shepherd sitting at attention beside me.
“Ginger likes you.”
Freya slides onto the same stool where my father sat. It’s only now I notice the music has ended and the crowd has begun to thin.
I hunch over my glass and take Freya in out of the corner of my eye. She has a way of carrying herself, cool and unattached, savvy enough to know a camera could capture her at any moment, and that all eyes in the room, including mine, are turned her way.
“Ginger’s my emotional support,” she says. “At least if they reprimand me for having her here.”
I doubt Freya Faith gets reprimanded for much.
Blancy mixes her an old-fashioned while Freya chats with a couple who compliment her on the show. After they leave, she downs the drink in one gulp. “Sugar’s good for the throat.”
Blancy already has another cocktail ready.
“This one I’ll sip,” Freya says. “Did you enjoy the set? Scene of the Crime ended almost ten years ago now, and I’m trying to get back out there before the world forgets me for good.
I may talk to my agent about booking some other clubs in the area, though my manager thinks it’s a shitty idea.
I’m testing material. I’m calling the show Rocker Chicks. ”
“Great name,” I say.
“It’s a terrible name. I’ll come up with a new one, but I’m only playing songs from the eighties. Stevie. Chrissie. Cyndi. Maybe a little Madonna.” She looks me up and down. “The eighties are ancient history to you.”
“But I’m an old soul.”
“If liking the eighties makes you an old soul, does that make me old because I lived in the eighties?”
“That’s not what I meant,” I say.
She taps a fingernail painted metallic blue against her glass. “Make it up to me. Order another beer and stick around. This town closes by nine, which isn’t my style after all those years in New York.”
She mentions New York like someone used to living in the public eye, someone used to having people she’s never met know all sorts of private information about her.
And I do know she lived in New York, while she doesn’t know my name.
I almost mention we’re connected through Paul Burke, that same manager who thinks performing in tiny clubs is a bad idea, but I suspect bringing Paul’s name into the conversation might spoil the mood.
“You have a good voice,” I say.
“I went to Juilliard on an opera scholarship,” she says. “No one knows that about me unless they read my Wikipedia page. I was one of those kids obsessed with my artistic principles until I got spat out into the world and learned wearing black and sneering didn’t pay the rent.”
She runs through this history like a stump speech, the kind of public-facing tale she’s employed a thousand times to put strangers at ease. I enjoy listening, losing myself in her story, while forgetting my own for the moment.
“My first job was on a soap,” she says. “Eternal Flame. Played Brenda Jackson, the town tramp with a heart of gold. I got to live in New York, and it paid the bills and taught me how to learn lines and hit my marks and deal with fans. Brenda was always getting in trouble—two-timing, embezzlement, hanging out with mobsters and spies. She came back from the dead twice!”
Like my father. So much for forgetting what’s been going on in my own life.
“How’d that work?” I ask.
“She drove off a cliff and her car sank,” Freya says, “but a month later, we learned her mobster boyfriend had a boat waiting to whisk her away. I had a summer share in Montauk that August, so the writers needed to explain her absence. The second time around, she disappeared during a Halloween party. She showed up two towns over with amnesia, working as a waitress with a new name and an awful wig.”
“No body, no death,” I say.
“At least in the soaps.”
And sometimes in real life.
I scan the room to see if my father’s returned. I feel the weight of the pint glass in my coat, something tangible, something that could provide definitive proof. “Where’s Brenda Jackson now?” I ask.
“Probably sitting in a bar somewhere, stirring up trouble.” Freya knocks my knee with hers. “Talking to an impossibly handsome young man.”
That, I’m pretty certain, was flirting. And Freya Faith is smoking hot, and I don’t care that she’s twice my age, or that my brother had photos of her taped to his wall when I was barely out of diapers, because she probably has way better options than a production assistant at a public radio station who can barely pay his rent.
“Maybe she’s with a mobster,” I say. “Or a spy.”
“You can’t be a spy. Spies need to blend in. You’re too fine to blend in.”
That was unmistakable flirting, and I can feel my face flush.
“Looks as though I have a shy one,” Freya says. “Blancy, do you think this one’s pretty?”
From behind the bar, Blancy raises a single eyebrow.
“If you swing that way,” Freya says, “Blancy’s your guy.”
Blancy flexes a bicep. He isn’t bad looking, but Freya’s way more my type.
“I’m taken,” Blancy says, checking his phone. “At least for the night.”
“My type,” I say, “wears black and insists on artistic principles.”
“A man who listens when I tell a story,” Freya says. “Not bad. What’s your name anyway?”
“Charlie.”
She fishes the cherry from her glass. “Tell me you don’t have a wife and kids at home, Charlie.”
“Not even a cat,” I say.
“Good. Ginger hates cats. And I should pack up and call it a night. Help me with my equipment.”
She played acoustic guitar tonight, so there isn’t much “equipment” to help with. By now, the pub has cleared except for a few diehards and Seton, who continues to watch the room like a cop, but mostly watches me. “Give me a sec,” I say.
Freya follows my gaze. “Whatever you need to do, but this train is leaving in two minutes, and it doesn’t wait for anyone.”
I grab my coat with the pint glass and approach Seton. “Tomorrow’ll be here in a couple of hours,” I say. “I’ll swing by the hospital to see how your mother’s doing.”
“You have a new friend,” Seton says.
“I’m about to find out,” I say. “Does your department do DNA tests?”
“Are you testing to see if Freya’s who she claims to be?”
“It’s for something else,” I say.
“We send samples to the state lab, but it’s expensive and I don’t normally have cause.”
“What if I paid for it?”
“It doesn’t work that way. We’d have to find a private lab.” Seton’s eyes narrow. “And why would you need a DNA test?”
“I’ll tell you tomorrow when we’re friends again.”
By the door, Freya waits, guitar case in hand. “Tick, tick, tick,” she says.
“Watch out for yourself,” Seton says.
“Say the word and I’ll stick around,” I say. “We can go to the hospital together.”
Seton bites her lip and shakes her head. “Go,” she says. “I’ll be fine.”
I follow Freya into the rainy night. Across the street, she tosses the guitar into the covered bed of a gigantic pickup truck, while Ginger leaps into the back seat.
“What’s the police chief’s story, anyway?” Freya asks. “Is she your girlfriend?”
“I don’t have a girlfriend.”
“Are you sure?”
If Seton and I are on the “friends to lovers” train, we’re clearly riding the local. “One hundred percent,” I say.
Our hands brush, sending a chill up my back. Freya’s sequined blouse sparkles under the streetlamp.
“You could do worse than Seton Haviland,” Freya says. “She’s as pretty as you, in a butch kind of way.”
“You keep objectifying me,” I say.
“I have plenty of experience. It happened to me for decades.”
“Should I objectify you now?”
Freya glances to where Seton watches us from the doorway. “She seems awfully interested in you.”
“What does it matter?”
“Because I don’t like to be second best,” Freya says as she pulls me in for a kiss.