Chapter Seventeen
Freya extracts herself from the detective’s clutches and stands with her back to the lake. “Don’t get territorial, Duncan,” she says. “Ginger doesn’t like it.”
On the contrary, the German shepherd seems perfectly content with the detective—certainly happier than she’s been with me—especially when he takes a bag of treats from his pocket and doesn’t make her sit before giving her one.
“You’ll spoil her,” Freya says.
“That’s my job,” Gilcrest says. “Save me any breakfast?”
“I could make you pancakes,” I say quickly, too quickly, but the last thing I want is to be on the detective’s bad side.
“Don’t bother,” Freya says. “The detective is leaving. And so are you.”
“I can explain,” I say.
“I doubt you can, Harold.”
Gilcrest places himself between Freya and me, and I don’t know if it’s instinctual or deliberate, but it’s definitely territorial. “You left your boat on the town dock,” he says to me. “Blancy wants it moved.”
“You’re running errands for Blancy now, Duncan?” Freya asks.
“When it suits my purposes,” Gilcrest says.
“Charlie was distracted,” Freya says, drawing my name out.
“I can see that,” Gilcrest says.
Freya piles the breakfast dishes onto a tray. “Bring these inside,” she says to him.
For a moment, the detective seems as though he might push back. Instead, he says, “Let’s go, girl,” to Ginger and follows Freya’s instructions, the dog prancing after him.
“You held back a bit too much of your story, Charlie,” Freya says. “You were the baby in the boat. You’re the guy who was assaulted at Burkehaven yesterday.” Her eyes dart toward the stitches in my forehead. “I’m out of practice. Gina would have put this together in two seconds flat.”
“I should have been more honest,” I say.
“More honest? You weren’t honest at all. What’s your game anyway?”
“You know how the episode of your show ended,” I say. “With the father being alive, after all. Could that be true? I mean, it happened to Brenda Jackson. Twice.”
Freya starts to answer and stops as her expression softens. “You’re a kid,” she says.
“I’m twenty-six.”
“And I’m fifty-six, so don’t remind me. Your family’s story made for good TV, but it’s been a quarter century since that murder.”
“They never found a body. My father could have gotten away.”
“Listen,” Freya says, “it’s much harder to disappear nowadays than it was when Brenda Jackson came back from the dead on Eternal Flame. If your father were alive, Duncan would have found him.”
“How do you know Gilcrest?” I ask.
“I told you I was dipping my toe back in and looking for work. I shot a pilot for a true-crime show earlier this year. I didn’t tell Paul I went to the audition.
The show wasn’t picked up, but Duncan was one of the experts they brought in.
He looks good on camera, and he looks good in person, too.
We took it from there.” She touches the stitches on my forehead. “He’ll find whoever did this to you.”
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you who I was last night,” I say.
“In your defense, I didn’t push you for it. But next time, I wouldn’t hold back. And we had fun together, Harold.”
“I’m Harold again?”
“You’ll always be Harold to me.”
Behind us, the glass door slides open. Ginger dashes out, followed by the detective.
“Charlie was leaving,” Freya says. “He might show up in my next TV series. You both might.”
I hope she won’t have me shot in the groin and dismembered like she did with her ex-husband.
“I hear you’ve been asking around about your father,” Gilcrest says. “Seton told me about the podcast.”
My eyes dart to where my phone sits on the table recording our conversation. Before I can move, Freya snatches up the phone and glances at the screen.
I start to explain, but Freya cuts me off. “And there I was about to forgive you.”
“Smooth move, buddy,” Gilcrest says.
“Shut up, Duncan,” Freya says, holding the phone toward me. “Delete every second of audio.”
I search for an excuse, but this time I don’t have one. I’ve managed to destroy any remnant of trust or good feeling between Freya and me with one boneheaded decision. I move the recording to the trash and delete it from there.
“Let me make something clear,” Freya says.
“Clear enough so a pretty blockhead like you can understand. If one word of what I said appears anywhere, ever, I’ll sic a team of lawyers on you.
And if you think your old family friend Paul Burke will come to your rescue, think twice.
Paul works for me, and his loyalty lies with his paycheck. Understood?”
I stare at the deck and nod.
“Good. Now get out of my house.”
My stomach is in knots as Ginger follows on my heels, a growl forming at the back of her throat.
I find my coat in the front closet and make sure I have my father’s pint glass from last night.
Then I get in the elevator with the detective.
Testosterone radiates off him as he lets me stew in my own silent misery. Outside, I take off toward the Landing.
“I’ll drive you,” Gilcrest says, in a way that doesn’t give me much choice but to follow him to his SUV.
He pulls away from the condo complex, waving a hand out the window toward Freya, who watches impassively from her deck.
As we turn onto the street, Paul Burke swerves by in his own car and takes the spot Gilcrest vacated.
I dread finding out what Freya will say to Paul about me, or how her choice words will get filtered and disseminated.
No matter what, by the time we have dinner tonight, I’ll be the butt of every joke.
“Here’s a tip,” Gilcrest says. “Be up front with people. It’s one of the basic tenets of police work. If you’d asked, Freya would have given you an interview. She loves attention, like any actor, but she’s not one to forgive, especially if you step on her privacy.”
I don’t need Duncan Gilcrest to tell me how much I messed up. All I want is to get out of this car and into my boat and away from this whole mess, but as he pulls around the marina and onto Main Street, he passes right by the Landing.
“Blancy can wait another half hour for you to move the boat,” Gilcrest says. “I want to make sure I understand what happened yesterday.”
He speeds along the lake, eventually turning into the woods at the bungalow.
When he comes to the fork in the road, he stops the SUV and swivels toward me.
Here, we’re alone, and the sun barely penetrates the thick canopy of trees.
Maybe the detective wants to give me a reason to stay away from his woman.
I press my back to the door, ready to tumble out and run for my life.
Instead, Gilcrest says, “I wish I was meeting you under different circumstances, Charlie. It must have been tough to grow up with all this baggage hanging over your head. Trauma can follow you, whether you know it or not. I get why you’re working on this podcast. Who have you talked to so far?”
“Freya, mostly,” I say. “But you saw what happened there. I doubt she’ll let me talk to her again.”
“You can record me,” Gilcrest says.
“Really?” I say.
“I’ve done hundreds of podcasts. And let me know what else I can do to help. Maybe we could get a book deal or a TV series. It’s a pretty compelling story.”
What would Julian say if I wound up beating him to a book deal? I lay my phone on the SUV’s console. “Detective Duncan Gilcrest,” I say. “Responding officer to the Idlewood Murders.”
Gilcrest leans over the phone. “Hi, guys,” he says.
“I’ve read about what happened,” I say. “But you were there. An eyewitness to the aftermath.”
“I’d been on the job for a week,” Gilcrest says. “I’d graduated from Columbia the previous fall and moved back here from New York.”
“You went to Columbia?”
“Try not to sound so surprised.” Gilcrest touches pause on the screen. “I’ll need a copy of the recording when we finish. And no funny business in the editing room. You have to make me sound good.”
“I will,” I say, and hit record again. “Tell me what you remember. You responded to the call. Where were you when it came in?”
“On Red Hill Road,” Gilcrest says, without pause.
“A few miles from your place. At first, all we knew was your mother had been hurt. I found her at that house by the graveyard. She was on the kitchen floor, barely breathing. I did what I could to stabilize her until the EMTs arrived, and then I took off for the island. You can verify this in my report, but I’d say I got to the island a half hour after the call first came in. Maybe forty-five minutes.”
“You must have seen blood in the parking area,” I say.
Gilcrest shakes his head. “It was dark. No moon. I couldn’t see much. I ran through the blood and tracked it across the footbridge. It messed up the forensics later on.”
“You didn’t wait for backup?” I ask.
“Rookie mistake,” Gilcrest says. “And the kind of mistake that can get a cop killed, but no, I didn’t wait.
I was much more concerned with seeing if anyone else had been hurt or killed.
There was one light on in the kitchen, a pot of Bolognese burned on the stove, and your brother’s half-finished math homework on the kitchen table, but otherwise, the place was quiet.
Eerily so. I almost left when I heard a baby crying. ” He catches my eye. “You.”
I imagine a younger version of Gilcrest standing on the shoreline, searching the dark until he found the rowboat far off in the water, silhouetted against a starry sky.
“It took ten minutes of cajoling to get your brother to row to shore,” Gilcrest says.
“Otherwise, we’d have had to send the police boat out to get you.
Reid was freezing. Both of you were. I got blankets from the house, and Reid barely spoke.
” He pauses. “Once he told us what had happened, the state detective started the search for your father.”
“Wendy Burrows,” I say.
“You’ve done your research.”
I take a deep breath and let the next question spill out. “What if I asked whether my father was alive?”
To his credit, Gilcrest doesn’t dismiss the query offhand.
He takes his time answering, and when he does, he seems to choose his words carefully.
“Burrows was a good detective. She didn’t find your father’s body, but tried, and she didn’t give up.
By the time she died later that summer, she’d exhausted every avenue.
Still, I can’t say I haven’t asked myself the same thing over the years.
So, if you asked me if I thought your father was alive, I’d play cop and reflect the question back to you. Do you think your father is alive?”
“I know he wouldn’t have wanted to be found.”
“If you have anything beyond hope or a gut feeling, now’s the time to share it.”
I have the pint glass wrapped in a napkin, ready to be tested for fingerprints and DNA, but the detective hasn’t earned my trust, not yet. “Maybe I’m looking for more than hope,” I say.
Gilcrest nods as though he may have another question to ask.
Instead, he puts the SUV in gear. “The search for my father. There’s the logline for your podcast. You can find him for real, or you can find him metaphorically.
” He drives the rest of the way to Burkehaven, where yellow tape marks the crime scene.
“You’ll need to avoid an unsolved mystery, though. Audiences hate open endings.”