Chapter Twenty
After dropping Seton at the town pier, I speed across the lake in the boat toward Idlewood Cove and text Julian: I met an old friend last night.
A moment later the phone rings. “I’m driving,” Julian says when I pick up.
“Same,” I shout. “In the boat.”
“Tough life,” Julian says.
I cut the engine. “I saw my father last night at a pub in town.”
“Now I’m pulling over,” Julian says, mumbling something about Daddy being on a work call, and to use inside voices. I picture him out and about in Newton with his two kids in the back seat.
“Details,” he says, and I fill him in on what’s happened in the last twenty-four hours.
“A house burns to the ground,” Julian says. “You’re assaulted. Your long-lost dad drinks a beer, and you go home with a TV star who questions the very story you’ve spent your whole life believing. Please tell me you captured every moment of this in high-quality, easy-to-edit audio footage.”
“Not quite,” I say, adding in what happened with Freya when she caught me recording her.
“Make nice with her,” Julian says. “Convince her to sign a release. You never know what you can recover. Are you positive it was your dad at the bar?”
“My friend’s running a DNA test. I’ll know soon enough.”
“We could know sooner than that, Charlie,” Julian says. “This case went cold years ago, but from what you’ve uploaded so far for me to listen to, you have enough material for a teaser. Let’s release something. You never know who’s out there, sitting on a secret.”
We could harness the true-crime community and follow the leads that come to us. “Give me the day to think about it,” I say.
And to warn people about what’s coming.
“I’ll touch base tonight,” Julian says. “In the meantime, talk to your mother. If anyone’s lying, it’s probably her.”
He clicks off the call, leaving me drifting in the boat. Julian’s words echo Freya’s from earlier: The wife is usually a prime suspect in a homicide. Maybe the answers to my questions do lie with the woman who fought off her knife-wielding husband and then crawled through the woods to safety.
When I pull the boat along the dock at Idlewood, the sun glints off the yellow Volvo’s windshield in the parking area. A thought skips across the back of my mind, too fleeting to capture. I try to find the thought, knowing it’s important, but it’s gone.
Inside the cottage, the rooms on the main floor and the back deck are empty. “Jane, are you here?” I shout, but my mother doesn’t answer.
In the kitchen, I stand at the same stove my father cooked at on the day he killed Isaac Haviland, imagining the scene all over again: twelve-year-old Reid at the table doing homework, my mother by the back door, me in my bassinet.
I imagine my father’s rage simmering alongside the Bolognese as my mother listened to the wall phone and checked her reflection in the mirror.
I remove a chef’s knife from the butcher block, the steel sliding on wood.
This isn’t the same knife my father used—that wasn’t recovered—but it probably has a similar weight and feel.
I step out onto the wraparound porch. In the quarter century since the murder, the trees have probably grown in, but I have a clear view of the parking area a hundred yards away.
I picture my mother out here, Reid beside her, as my father confronted her lover.
That thought I had on the dock flares up.
This time I nearly pin it down before it flits off again.
Knife in hand, I march down the steps and onto the path.
I charge through the trees, across the footbridge, and emerge where Mr. Haviland would have stood by his truck.
Even in playing the role of my father, I forget to hide the knife behind my back.
Instead, I grip the handle in a fist, the steel blade glinting in the sun.
As Freya said earlier, the knife should have alerted Mr. Haviland to danger.
I start a new recording on my phone. “Earlier,” I say, “Freya Faith told me audiences were smart, that they can spot holes in a plot. Here in the parking area on the shore beside Idlewood, in the place my father stabbed Isaac Haviland, I can see the porch on the house where my brother observed the crime as it unfolded.”
I envision my mother approaching, her hands extended, her voice soft.
I wonder if she understood that my father had the capacity to kill.
“Even with the knife,” I say, “my father would have been outnumbered two to one. Mr. Haviland was tall and strong. My mother runs a construction firm. She’s hardly a shrinking violet.
They should have been able to put up a fight. ”
I cross the footbridge again. As I pass the dock, raised voices sound from the other end of the island. I follow the noise through the woods, toward the firepit. When I catch notes of anger, I start to run, recognizing Vance Moodey’s voice. “Pay up,” he says. “It doesn’t get any simpler.”
“I need a week,” Reid says. “It’s not as though I planned on a fire.”
“What good will another week do?” Vance asks. “Did you think I wouldn’t find out?”
I burst from the trees, my breath ragged. Reid spins to face me, then stumbles back, hands raised. “We’re fine,” he says. “Just a friendly conversation.”
It didn’t sound friendly to me.
“Come on, son,” Vance says, rising to his full height. “Drop it.”
I look at the knife in my hand—forgotten—before letting it fall to the ground.
“That’s better,” Vance says.
“I didn’t see your truck,” I say to him. “I heard you arguing.”
Vance holds his palms out. “It’s business.
Nothing more. And I parked at Burkehaven, but there were cops all over the place.
I decided to walk over here and see if I could get a straight answer.
” He holds Reid’s gaze. “You have a nice view of the lake. It’d be a shame to lose it, son.
You’re lucky your mother and I have an understanding, but maybe I should fill her in anyway. ”
“Don’t call me son,” Reid says. “And leave my mother out of this.”
“One week, Reid,” Vance says. “Then it’s on to plan B.”
He brushes by me, leaving along the path. Reid waits until he’s out of earshot. “What’s with the knife, Charlie? You looked like you were in a slasher film.”
“What was Vance talking about?” I ask.
“Nothing for you to worry about,” Reid says, adjusting his glasses and making his way along the path toward the cottage. I grab the knife from the ground and follow.
“I deal with assholes like Vance Moodey every day,” Reid says. “It’s part of the job. You should stay in radio, where everyone’s nice. It suits you.” He punches my arm. “And I heard about your misadventures with Freya last night.”
I feel my face turn red. “Are you jealous?”
“Hardly,” Reid says. “My Freya Faith fan club closed shop decades ago. But your tryst is the only thing anyone’s talking about, that and the fire. What I haven’t heard is when Gilcrest plans to arrest Andrea Haviland.”
“He asked me a million questions this morning,” I say. “He wanted to know where you were when the fire started. Paul and Mom, too.”
“Tell him to ask me himself,” Reid says.
“He’s looking at the money and trying to find another motive,” I say. “Other suspects, too.”
Reid clucks his tongue. “Like a disgruntled lumber supplier. That’s what has you all worked up. Listen, sometimes projects turn into high-stakes shell games, but it all works out in the end. I have to figure out what to move where.”
I haven’t stopped recording since I started in the parking area. I hold up my phone and show Reid the screen. “Idlewood,” I say. “Reid Kilgore, Sunday morning after the fire.”
My brother’s expression turns stony. “I’m not doing this,” he says.
“Do you remember the time I saw Dad? I was at a soccer game here in town. Mrs. Haviland was there, too. Later that night, you read me a story, and I told you I’d seen him.”
“Honestly, Charlie,” Reid says. “You claimed to see Dad so many times, it all runs together.”
“You told me not to mention seeing him to Mom, that it would upset her.”
“It would have upset her. Who wants to hear that your six-year-old son is conjuring up images of your dead husband?”
“I saw Dad last night. He came to the Landing.”
Reid takes off his glasses. “If Dad started the fire, you could turn that into a podcast, too.”
“I’m not making this up,” I say.
“I don’t care,” Reid says. “I need to get to Burkehaven and talk to the foreman, because if you haven’t put two and two together, I’m in a mess right now, and it’s not one that digging up ancient history will solve. And I don’t give you permission to use anything on that phone. Not one word.”
Reid leaves me beside the cottage. He crosses the footbridge and disappears into the woods.
A moment later, he appears on the opposite shore by the cars.
I sit on the wraparound porch, in the same spot where Reid stood twenty-five years ago, and that thought I tried to capture earlier returns, this time fully formed. And it makes my blood run cold.
“I’m on the back porch at Idlewood,” I say into my phone.
“Sunlight shines off the windshield on my father’s Volvo.
” I may be by myself, but when I say these next words, I won’t be able to unsay them.
“Reid told the police he heard Mr. Haviland say my love to my mother, but Reid was here, where I am now, a hundred yards from the parking area. He wouldn’t have heard what Mr. Haviland said, not from this far away. ”
I pause the recording, my feet rooted to the porch, not sure what my next move should be or who I could possibly trust with what I’ve realized. Freya poked holes in the story, but this—this is an actual lie, one I can point to and see, one that’s been told to me my entire life.
My mother must know the truth. Maybe this was what she planned to tell me the last time we spoke, and maybe Julian and Freya were right to call her the prime suspect.
I pull up her name on my phone and get voicemail, so I send a text. I need to talk to you. As soon as you get this. It’s about Dad.
Right then, my phone rings. I pick up without looking at the screen, expecting to hear my mother’s voice. Instead, it’s Gilcrest. “Would you come by the station in Hero?” he asks.
“I’ll be there in ten minutes,” I say.
I’m halfway to my car when my phone rings again. This time, Seton’s number flashes across the screen. “Where are you?” she asks as soon as I click into the call. “I’ll come get you.”
“I’m on my way to the station.”
“Charlie,” Seton says, her voice barely a whisper, “keep your mouth shut. Don’t say a word.”
Then the call disconnects.