Chapter Fifteen
I’m standing in the rain, under a streetlamp, and I’m not sure what to do, where to put my hands, or what they should touch, because I’m kissing a girl. But she’s not a girl, she’s very much a woman, and she’s a good kisser—a very good kisser—and she’s Freya Faith.
Freya fucking Faith.
“Relax,” Freya says. “You’re stiff as a board.”
I pull back.
“I said relax, not stop. And chill out before you screw the mood.”
From the back of the truck, Ginger barks and paws at the window, but not in a “Hey, guys, what about me?” kind of way. She’d probably rip my throat out if she could.
“Ginger can be protective,” Freya says.
“I’ve noticed.”
“She’s gentle unless there’s a reason for her not to be,” Freya adds. “Anything I need to worry about?”
“This is a small town, and everyone knows who you are. They’ll talk.”
“I can handle gossip on the Hero Board. It’s when I make the cover of the National Enquirer that I worry.”
Unlike most of us, Freya’s actually appeared in that tabloid. She steps back and opens the driver’s-side door. She stands on the running board, her auburn hair falling from the knot at the back of her head. “Are you coming?”
I trip over my own feet as I scramble to the passenger’s side door.
Ginger bares her teeth, but when Freya tells her to sit, the dog transforms, woofing a welcome.
I find myself sprawled across the front seat, kissing Freya all over again.
This time, Ginger tries to nose her way into the action as Freya bats her away and mumbles, “Stop.”
“Is that stop for me?” I ask.
“Not in any way.”
By now, the town has mostly closed for the evening.
Freya disentangles herself and swerves around the southern side of the marina and into the parking lot where the old motel used to be.
A steel door opens beneath the new condos, and Freya pulls into an underground garage.
Lights flood the empty space as she cuts the engine.
Behind us, the steel garage door seals shut, and the kind of silence that comes from being locked in a soundproof room descends over us.
“Should I let someone know I’m here?” I ask.
“Your girlfriend knows where you are. She’ll take care of you.”
“I told you Seton’s not my girlfriend.”
Freya kisses me. “I don’t need to make enemies with the chief of police. I get enough speeding tickets as it is.”
She jumps from the truck and opens the back so Ginger can leap to the cement floor.
The dog puts her nose to the ground, sweeping the perimeter of the garage, her body low and agile.
She pauses once, tilting her head, before sitting at attention, her ears pivoting.
“All set,” Freya says. “Grab the guitar.”
I get out of the truck and pull the guitar case from the covered bed. At another steel door, Freya enters a code, and what sounds like the lock on a bank safe releases. Ginger trots ahead of us into a hallway, sniffing until she stops at an elevator door.
“Paranoid much?” I ask.
“Cautious.”
“You just picked up a guy you’ve never met in a bar.”
“You don’t fit the profile of who I worry about.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I guess.”
Inside, we take the elevator up two floors, where it opens onto a huge space of clean lines and glass that reminds me of Reid’s apartment in the South End—as it should, since Reid designed this whole building.
Freya hangs my coat in a closet, my father’s pint glass tucked into the coat’s front pocket.
“Bar’s in the kitchen,” she says. “Mix me an old-fashioned.”
She whistles, and Ginger leads the way up a set of invisible stairs to the second floor.
The condo has soaring ceilings and inset lighting, with a vast open plan divided into separate seating areas.
One area has a piano and a guitar stand.
Another has a workspace with bookshelves that rise to the ceiling.
A third has comfortable, overstuffed furniture and a huge television set.
Modern art hangs on nearly every inch of wall space, including a portrait that takes me a moment to recognize as Freya. It’s a nude.
A kitchen runs along one wall, with white cabinets, soapstone counters, and appliances that belong in a restaurant.
I find a recipe for an old-fashioned on my phone and have doused sugar cubes with bitters by the time Ginger trots down the stairs.
Freya follows, having swapped the glittery blouse for a flowing hostess dress straight from the sixties that somehow works in her favor.
I hand her the cocktail. She clinks her glass against mine. I take a sip and gag on the bourbon. “Lightweight,” Freya says as she leads me through one of the sitting areas to a set of steel, floor-to-ceiling doors.
When Ginger gives the all clear, we join her on a deck that runs the length of the apartment and overlooks the harbor. The rain has stopped, and the skies have cleared, and a sliver of a moon shines down on the blackened surface of the lake. Freya shivers and steps a bit closer to me.
“What would bring someone like you to Hero?” I ask.
“The outdoors. The fresh air.”
“The nonstop nightlife.”
She inches closer. “Yeah, there’s that.”
I hear Julian in my head, coaching me to get to the heart of the story. “Didn’t you grow up visiting the lake?” I ask.
Freya’s shoulders stiffen under her hostess dress. “How would you know that?” she asks.
“You’re the only TV star in town,” I say. “Who else would we talk about?”
“I’m hardly a TV star. I’ve barely booked a gig in a decade.
Honestly, I almost never leave my co-op anymore, but in Hero I’m famous.
Everyone knows everything about me. Maybe that’s why I enjoy it here.
” Freya leans on the railing, a breeze blowing through her hair.
“But yes, my family came to the lake. We stayed at Burkehaven Cove in a little cabin.”
“Paul Burke’s place?” I say.
“You know him?”
“Everyone knows everyone here,” I say.
“Well, Paul’s mother and my mother went to Miss Porter’s in Connecticut. We rented the cabin for two weeks every summer while the Burkes stayed at the farmhouse.”
I sip the old-fashioned, this time allowing the bourbon to linger on my tongue to keep from choking.
Freya knew Paul back then. She probably knew everyone involved in the murder: my mother, Paul, but also Isaac and Andrea Haviland.
My father, too. “There was an episode of Scene of the Crime set on a lake,” I say.
“Was it based on the murder that happened here?”
Freya steps away from me. “Tell me you’re not some true-crime freak.”
“That murder is the most exciting thing that ever happened in Hero,” I say, doing my best to feign casual interest. “People talk as if it happened yesterday. The guy who committed the murder, you must have met him.”
“Mark Kilgore,” Freya says. “Yeah, he was friends with Paul. He’d come to Burkehaven when we were staying there. Mark was nice. And I never believed what they said about him.”
That’s the last thing in the world I expected her to say, and I gulp the old-fashioned to mask my surprise, relieved by a fit of coughing that keeps me from spewing questions at her.
She swears under her breath and retreats inside, returning with a glass of water.
“You should stick to apple juice,” she says.
I drink the water down.
We all know what happened, Charlie.
But do we? My father is missing and presumed dead, but tonight he walked into the Landing and drank a beer.
I have his pint glass in my coat pocket.
And until tonight, no one’s ever suggested there could be another explanation for what happened on the lake.
I wonder if I’ve been waiting my whole life to hear Freya’s words.
“What didn’t you believe?” I ask.
Freya tosses her hair as though she’s on the set of Scene of the Crime, playing Special Agent Gina Shock. “Let’s talk about something else. Or do something else.” She runs her fingertips along my forearm. “Have any ideas?”
I’ve waited twenty-five years to find out what happened next, and I can wait a bit longer. Besides, I’m not about to miss this opportunity with Freya, and it won’t present itself again.
“I suppose I do,” I say, and then my fingers are in Freya’s thick hair, and her hands are on my waist, on my belt, as she pulls me through the house, up those stairs to another steel door she unlocks with a code.
She shoves me onto the mattress as doubts stop spinning through my mind and the steel door latches behind us.
“Are we in a safe room?” I ask.
“Off,” Freya says, and the room goes black.
I wake the next morning to something cold and wet in my ear. I shove Ginger’s nose as she paws at my chest and then makes her way across the huge bed to where Freya lies beside me. Freya’s voice, huskier than last night, sounds through the impenetrable dark. “Ginger likes you.”
“All animals like me,” I say.
“On,” Freya says, and the recessed lighting slowly illuminates.
She props her head on a pillow, her hair tousled.
She’s wearing a vintage T-shirt from the Pat Benatar Tropico tour, and I wonder if she’s wondering, as I am, how we wound up here, or when she might send me packing.
I wonder if she’d be willing, as I am, to go at it again this morning.
I move a lock of hair from her eyes, and she doesn’t flinch. A good sign.
“Out,” Freya says.
The muscles beneath Ginger’s black-and-tan coat ripple as she transforms from pet to guard dog.
She leaps from the bed and stands at attention by the door, eyes alert.
“I had her trained by monks,” Freya says, “but I drew the line at teaching her German. Too intimidating. She knows more commands than my ex-husband. But even the best guard dogs need to pee in the morning.” She kisses me.
It’s a kiss I feel all the way down to my toes. “Did you know I was married?” she asks.
Freya eloped with an actor from Scene of the Crime, and they divorced a year later, when he had an affair with a reality star. His character got shot in the groin and was dismembered by a serial killer in the middle of that season. “Why would I know you were married?” I ask.
Freya slips out of bed, opens a wall safe, and retrieves a handgun. I scramble away from her. “Okay, I knew about your divorce. It was all over the internet!”
Freya slides a magazine into place. “That’s better,” she says, unsealing the door.
Sunlight streams into the room. Ginger trots out, nose to the ground, and my heart rate begins to return to normal. “Let me guess,” I say. “A perimeter check?”
“Ginger keeps me safe,” Freya says, nodding at the gun. “And so does this.”
She patters after the dog, and I settle into the bed. As nervous as the gun makes me, Freya’s as attractive as she was last night, and I’m thrilled to have woken up next to her. Plus, the bed is soft, and the sheets have a thread count I’ll probably never experience again for the rest of my life.
When Freya returns, she closes the steel door to keep Ginger on the other side and lays the handgun on the bedside table.
“Get that thing away from me,” I say.
“You must be a city boy.”
“I grew up in Hero.”
“Most people around here are used to guns.”
Freya releases the magazine, returns the gun to the safe, slides into bed beside me, and lights a cigarette, exhaling toward the ceiling. I take the cigarette from her, inhale, and cough.
“It’s a disgusting habit,” Freya says.
“Then quit.”
“I wish it were that easy. I do it to keep thin, to keep from completely disappearing now that I’m trying to get back in the game.” She inhales and lays her head on my chest. “We could stay here all day.”
I picture us lying together into the afternoon, working through the pack of cigarettes as though we’re in some ancient movie. A scene flashes through my mind: a man and a woman in bed after a night of passion, the man delighted by the turn of events. “Have you seen Harold and Maude?” I ask.
Freya grinds out the cigarette. “Do you mean the movie where a teenager sleeps with a seventy-nine-year-old Holocaust survivor?” she asks.
That is the movie I meant. And I suppose, based on Freya’s reaction and our age difference, I shouldn’t have asked the question at this particular moment, especially when she hits me with a pillow. “Harold and fucking Maude?” she says. “Do I look seventy-nine years old to you?”
I cover my head, and she hits me again. I peek between my fingers as Ginger growls and tries to paw her way around the heavy steel door. Freya straddles me, the pillow raised. And don’t think I’ve forgotten the gun, either. She doesn’t look anywhere close to seventy-nine years old.
“I take it back!” I say.
“You can’t take it back. It’s been said, and now I won’t get the image out of my head. Ever! For the rest of my life.”
“I’m sorry,” I say.
Freya collapses onto the bed beside me and says, “Stay.”
I’m not sure who she’s talking to, but Ginger’s growls stop at once.
“I have a thick skin,” Freya adds, getting out of bed, putting on a pink flannel robe, and tying her hair in a turquoise scrunchie.
“But you spoiled the mood. Remember that the next time you say something dumb to a beautiful woman, Harold.”
“My name’s Charlie.”
“Not to me, it isn’t,” she says. “And get up. I want something decadent for breakfast. Please tell me you know how to cook.”