Chapter Sixteen
In the bathroom, I try my best to freshen up, smoothing my dark hair and brushing my teeth with an index finger.
I’m taken aback by the purple welt on my forehead.
I’d forgotten about the wound and the stitches, but seeing them returns me to yesterday’s events.
I check my phone for a message from Seton, but nothing’s there.
I’ll drive to the hospital as soon as Freya sends me on my way.
I search the medicine cabinet for an aspirin, moving aside a bottle of metallic-blue nail polish before glancing behind me.
With Freya’s attention to security, my guess is that every room in this house has a camera—even the bathroom—and I bet she won’t appreciate seeing me searching through her things.
Downstairs, the aroma of coffee fills the air. Freya adds four spoons of sugar and a glug of cream to her own mug and stirs. “How do you take your coffee, Harold?”
“Black is good. You want something decadent?” I say. “How about waffles?”
“Do I seem like someone who owns a waffle iron?”
Freya seems like someone who has anything she wants, though she clearly hasn’t forgiven me for mentioning Harold and Maude.
“Pancakes, then,” I say.
After I fumble through playing short-order cook, we head to the deck, carrying stacks of pancakes loaded with maple syrup and butter. In the marina, people have already begun to take their boats out for the day. We settle at a teak table beneath a pergola covered in budding rose vines.
“Not a bad way to greet the morning,” I say.
“I kept my co-op in New York,” Freya says. “I can go back when I’m ready. But this is a great escape for now.”
“Is that what all the security is about? Escaping?”
“I have to be careful. I’m by myself. People know who I am.”
“You sleep with steel grates over the windows and wake up with a gun. That’s more than being careful.”
Freya nestles the mug between her hands.
“There are plenty of weirdos out there, fans who blur the line between fiction and reality. It gets scary, and for a while I let it get the better of me. Besides, we both know bad things can happen in small towns. You’re the one who was asking about that case on the lake last night. ”
Now would be the time to come clean and tell Freya who I am.
But I’ve already dodged the truth, and Freya, with her guns and safe room and guard dog, doesn’t seem the type to forgive evasiveness.
“People talk,” I say, “and they were talking about the episode of your show set on the lake during your set last night.”
“I worked over three hundred cases. They blend together.”
“You didn’t work any cases. You weren’t a real cop.”
Freya punches my arm. “Gina Shock wasn’t a cop. She was a special agent with the CBI.”
“Okay, what did Special Agent Gina Shock of the CBI make of the case on the lake? I mean, it was ripped from the headlines.”
“Ripped from the headlines is from another show,” Freya says.
“But, yeah, I got a feel for storylines after a while. Some came together easily and felt organic. Others, not so much. Those ones, we’d have to massage to make them plausible, no matter how much we pulled from real life.
That story, the one about the husband who snaps and kills his wife’s lover and then goes after his own kids, it made no sense to me.
Something about that case didn’t add up. ”
Something about that case didn’t add up.
That’s a sound bite I should have captured.
I stand and shove my phone into my pocket. “Too much coffee,” I say.
In the bathroom, I splash water on my face and take three deep breaths. Something I can’t articulate is happening here; I feel it in my gut. I tap record on the phone. Whether I can use this audio or not, I need to capture it. Maybe I’ll convince Freya to sign a release later.
Outside, my every movement feels deliberate and suspicious, especially as I lay the phone face down on the table between us. “Something about that case didn’t add up?” I say, parroting Freya’s words.
I’ll have my own voice reflecting her earlier statement, even if that voice is shaking.
Freya sets her coffee aside. My heart pounds so loudly she must hear it.
“What’s got you on edge?” she asks.
“I woke up next to Freya Faith. It may not be a big deal for Ginger, but it is for me.”
“You’re not the first to find me intimidating, Harold.”
“I doubt I’ll be the last,” I say as I settle into the subterfuge of the situation. “But what didn’t add up? Was it because you knew so many of the players? I mean, you work with Paul Burke. He’s your manager. Wasn’t he at the lake house right before the murder happened?”
Freya scrutinizes me one more time, then seems to shake away her doubts.
“I knew those people as a kid,” she says.
“But the oddest thing was that I saw Isaac Haviland for the first time in years a few months before he was killed. He came to New York and was hanging around a shoot in the West Village. Security was tight on the set. He got roughed up a little bit, and I felt terrible about it, so I took him to a diner after we wrapped.” She rolls her eyes.
“He was looking for money. He wanted me to invest in the Landing.”
“Did you give him any?”
“I gave him a hundred bucks and got rid of him as soon as I figured out what was going on.” Freya shakes her head.
“Isaac weirded me out, but that’s not the part of the story I can’t reconcile.
When we shot Scene of the Crime, I used to hang out in the writers’ room and drive them crazy questioning plots.
There were so many holes in the Idlewood storyline—”
“Some guy’s wife is having an affair,” I say. “He finds out and loses it. That story’s been told a thousand times.”
Freya runs a hand along Ginger’s back. “Sure, the setup was straightforward enough: Jane Reid has an affair with Isaac Haviland while they’re working on rehabbing the Landing. Plenty of my cases involved someone sleeping with someone they shouldn’t, and adultery’s the oldest story there is.”
“You don’t have any cases,” I remind her. “You’re an actor.”
“Good actors immerse themselves in their roles, and I played Gina Shock for thirteen years. I barely know where she ends and I begin. But what happened next?”
“Mark Kilgore killed Isaac Haviland and fled the scene once he realized what he’d done.”
As soon as I hear myself say my father’s name, I wish I hadn’t. I should have called him that guy or the husband. I know way too much about this case for a casual twenty-six-year-old observer, but Freya seems to miss my fumble.
“Follow the evidence,” she says. “That’s what Gina Shock would tell you.
Mark Kilgore was cooking dinner for his family.
His older son was studying at the kitchen table.
They were listening to Janet Jackson. Jane Reid had set up paper lanterns on the dock for the Lantern Festival. What happened next?”
I know exactly what happened next—Isaac Haviland showed up and called my mother’s name across the cove—but I won’t make the mistake of showing too much familiarity again. “I’m fuzzy on the details.”
“Mark Kilgore leaves the house with a chef’s knife and confronts his wife’s lover.”
I don’t see the problem. “And?” I say.
Freya sits up. “When you’re putting together a show, it has to hang together.
If there’s the tiniest blip in logic, the online lunatics rip the story to shreds.
So, a character’s having an affair with some guy’s wife.
He drives out to the house, and the guy—the one he’s betrayed—charges out of the trees with a chef’s knife. What should the character do?”
Nowadays, he’d dial 9-1-1, but there were no cell phones then, or not ones that got reception at Idlewood. “He could get in the car and lock the doors,” I say. “Or maybe the guy held the knife behind his back. Or maybe Isaac Haviland was concerned about Jane and the kids.”
“Let’s say all that’s true. We’d have to work the concern into dialogue, but what happened next?”
This time I don’t fumble. “All I know is what I heard at the bar last night.”
Freya waits for me to continue.
“Fine,” I say. “Jane Reid left her kids on the island and tried defusing the situation. She asked Isaac Haviland to leave, and he was nearly in his car when he called her my love.”
“That’s when Mark lost it,” Freya says. “He stabbed Isaac in the gut, and when Jane tried to intervene, he stabbed her, too.”
Sounds like great TV. Drama. Intense emotion. Rash decisions. “Isn’t this the kind of story your whole show was built on?”
“When things followed a certain logic.”
“Murder doesn’t follow logic.”
“Each murder has its own logic. And here’s something else we had to change for the show: Isaac Haviland crawled into the woods to escape.
The police found him later, propped up against a tree, where he’d bled out, but if Mark was so intent on killing Isaac, why would he let him escape?
On the show, we finished off the victim right away.
And there’s the whole thing with the preteen and the baby in the rowboat. ”
Now she’s questioning my story. “That’s the part everyone remembers,” I say. “Two kids in a rowboat while paper lanterns lit up the sky. I mean, you used that image on the show.”
“It couldn’t have been more cinematic,” Freya says. “But Mark stabbed his wife and left her to drag herself through the woods to her sister’s house? Why would he let her go?”
“Because he realized what he’d done and was horrified with himself.”
“But if you try your best to murder someone in cold blood, you don’t feel bad about it and then threaten to also kill your own children. Once you find your conscience, it’s there and you have to deal with it.”
“Maybe he didn’t realize his wife was still alive.”
Freya waves a hand. “That could be the case, and all of these details are small, and one or two might have been fine in the final storyline, but not all. Audiences are smarter than you think they are. We had to kill off the boyfriend and the wife to make the story plausible. And let’s not forget about the detective who died in the middle of the investigation. What’s her name? Wendy something.”
“She was in a car accident,” I say.
“Yeah, drunk and alone. She passed out behind the wheel and drowned when her car rolled into the lake. That’s an unattended death, not an accident.”
I start to argue, but slump in my chair. This isn’t fiction, and we’re not in a writers’ room.
“The end of that episode was a good one,” Freya says. “The kids got kidnapped, and we found the husband hiding with them in a cabin in the woods. He hadn’t died during the snowstorm at all. Gina exchanged herself for the children, and there was a terrific showdown. Tons of shooting.”
I’ve watched segments of this episode before, but I’ve mostly focused on the beginning, the section about me. “There was a final twist,” I say.
“Always,” Freya says. “And guess who came up with it? Me! The writers were totally pissed off because as soon as they heard my idea, they knew the story had to end that way. The husband had been having his own affair. He tried to cut it off, and the woman framed him for murder. And do you know who he was having an affair with? The wife of the man who was killed by the lake.”
My mother’s words come to me again: Good marriages don’t end. And bad marriages don’t have a good guy and a bad guy.
“You’re talking about Andrea Haviland,” I say.
Maybe Mrs. Haviland has something to hide, after all.
With the podcast, I set out to learn more about who my father was, but Freya now has me questioning the very foundation of what happened on the lake.
“Could she have been having an affair with Mark Kilgore?”
“I mean, I suppose,” Freya says. “But this was a TV show. Not real life. If I were investigating this case, I’d start with the wife. Jane Reid. The wife should always be a prime suspect.”
My mother did not stab herself so she could crawl through the woods and almost bleed out. “I don’t think so,” I say.
“If you say so, Harold. But give me a whiteboard, two pepperoni pizzas, and a team of sweaty writers, and I’ll make it work. You can make any story work when you have a deadline.”
I glance to where my phone lies on the table, recording our every word. It’s time to be honest with Freya. “I should tell you something,” I say.
“Don’t bother baring your soul, Harold,” Freya says. “We’re almost done with breakfast. Who knows if we’ll ever see each other again.”
Her phone rings. She glances at the screen and clicks into the call. “What?” she says.
I hear a muffled voice on the other end.
Freya nods and looks at me as she moves to the other side of the deck.
Below us, a car pulls into the lot. Detective Gilcrest gets out wearing a black anorak and leather sneakers, a phone to his ear.
He looks up to where I sit, as Freya clicks off her call.
“I need to buzz him in,” she says, her voice tight.
I’m pretty certain my game is up.
She slides open the glass door, and when she returns, she stands at the railing, looking out over the lake. I start to speak, but she cuts me off. “I don’t appreciate being played.”
Behind us, the detective steps onto the deck. I expect Ginger to growl. Instead, she twitches, as though desperate to greet him.
“Release,” Freya says.
The dog dashes to the detective, tail wagging. Gilcrest crouches to pet her, then takes Freya’s hand and kisses her cheek. “Charlie Kilgore,” he says to me. “I heard a rumor I might find you here.”