Chapter Twenty-Seven
The bells over the door at the Landing ring as I walk into the café. “Is Mrs. Haviland around?” I ask Blancy, who works the espresso machine.
He jerks a thumb toward the kitchen, where Andrea Haviland and the chef are getting ready for lunch. She wears a black apron, her gray ponytail peeking out from the back of a baseball cap.
“Hey, Blancy,” I say. “Did that guy who sat with me at the bar ever come back?”
“Not when I’ve been working, but I have your number. I’ll let you know if I see him. And Charlie, your brother owes me. Tell him if he doesn’t return my calls, I may show up at the house.”
Great. Reid probably hasn’t paid the catering bill from the memorial service.
“Will do,” I say as Mrs. Haviland takes off her apron and greets me with a long hug, then piles chocolate chip cookies from the bakery case onto a plate.
She leads us through the café to the back porch, where we sit at a high-top.
“You’re looking better,” I say. “How’re the lungs? ”
“Functioning,” she says, “though it was touch and go there for a few days.”
She pushes the cookies toward me, as though she doesn’t know what to say next. I break one in half. It’s salty and sweet, the chocolate warm.
“I baked them this morning,” Mrs. Haviland says. “But don’t tell Seton. That girl eats my profits, especially now that she lives upstairs. Are you two talking to each other yet?”
That’s part of the reason I stopped by here this morning. “I owe her an apology,” I say.
Mrs. Haviland reties her ponytail. She can’t be much older than Freya, but she carries a life lived in the lines around her eyes.
“Don’t wait too long,” she says. “The summer’s short.
So is life.” She glances down at the table.
“I’m sorry about Jane, about your mother, Charlie.
I wanted to talk more at the memorial service, but—”
“But Reid was showing his charming side,” I say.
“Making myself scarce seemed like the respectful option. These last few weeks must have been impossible.”
There’s that grief again, rearing its ugly head right when I thought I might have tamed it for good. And impossible is an understatement. “I’m distracting myself by playing cop,” I say.
“Is that why you’re here? Do you think I started the fire? Your brother does.”
“Reid needs someone to blame. You have to admit the whole situation is suspicious, though. The cameras at Burkehaven are destroyed, and then the house burns.”
“Suspicious is a good word for it,” Mrs. Haviland says. “I heard I’d destroyed those cameras before I’d heard the cameras had been destroyed. Seems to me someone wanted to cast blame, and I was the easiest target.”
“Tell me what happened,” I say, laying my phone between us.
“The infamous podcast,” Mrs. Haviland says. “There are consequences for telling other people’s stories, Charlie.”
“You owe me for saving you from the fire.”
Mrs. Haviland leans back on her stool, skepticism etched into her expression. “How do you decide what you’ll use on a podcast? How do you know which parts of the story you’ll tell?”
“I don’t know until I hear it,” I say. “And sometimes I don’t know then. Connections show up when you least expect them.”
“Which story are you telling?” Mrs. Haviland asks. “Past or present?”
I’m not sure anymore, or how the strands intertwine, but I do know understanding what was is essential to understanding who we’ve become. “Right now,” I say, “you’re telling me your story. Later on, I’ll see how it weaves into the whole.”
Mrs. Haviland considers the phone for a moment and gives me a curt nod. “Go ahead,” she says.
I start recording.
“Tell me about my father,” I say.
“You first,” Mrs. Haviland says. “I heard Mark bought you a beer.”
There really aren’t many secrets in Hero, though I’d hoped Seton would keep this one to herself. “Seton tells you everything,” I say.
“Except what she doesn’t.”
“Well, yeah. My dad sat with me at the bar and told me he was worried about an old friend. And since you’re getting right into it, you’re an old friend he could have been worried about.”
The corners of Mrs. Haviland’s mouth turn up. “Now I get it,” she says. “You’re wondering whether Mark heard I was in the hospital and had almost died. I could buy into that story if it were true, but I haven’t seen your father since he disappeared. If he was here, it wasn’t for me.”
I try reading her expression to determine whether she’s holding back, but her face doesn’t reveal much. “Not once,” I say, “in the years he’s been gone?”
“I wish I had, but no, Mark hasn’t been sneaking in and out of my life for a quarter century.”
“What would you do if he showed up right now?”
“I’d call my daughter and let her do her job.
” Mrs. Haviland breaks the edge off one of the cookies and eats it slowly.
“Let’s pretend you actually saw Mark that night.
What could have brought a man who’s been in hiding to the very town he fled all those years ago?
Maybe he was worried about his son, Charlie.
You were in the hospital that day, too. And maybe when he saw you at the bar, once he got to talk to you, he felt okay leaving. ”
“How would he have known about the fire?” I ask.
“He could have heard about it on the local news. Both of our names were made public.”
I’m slightly annoyed that Mrs. Haviland came up with this idea so easily, one I should have thought of on my own.
But the concept of my father seeking me out—worrying about me—isn’t something I could have contemplated until recently.
For years, my only impressions of Mark Kilgore have been of rage and anger.
Now a person has begun to emerge and replace those emotions, and enough doubt has been raised about what happened that I could almost buy into Mrs. Haviland’s theory.
“As he was leaving that night,” I say, “he told me I was all he could think about.”
“Sounds like I may be right, then,” Mrs. Haviland says. “What else have you got? Ask, and I’ll tell you what I can.”
“My mother called you the night before the fire. You talked for more than two minutes.”
“It was after midnight, and she wanted to meet at Burkehaven in the morning.”
“Did she mention a project in Finstock?”
“We didn’t talk business. She said she had something important to tell me but wouldn’t say what.”
“You and Jane—”
“We hated each other?”
“You said it, not me.”
“Time mellows grudges. Jane and I knew each other long before she had the affair with my husband. We’ve managed to coexist in this tiny community. We could have been friends again if the circumstances were right.”
I like Mrs. Haviland. She’s been kind to me when she hasn’t had to be, but she also had a long-standing grudge against my mother, one I doubt had mellowed as much as she wants me to believe, so I remind myself to remain impartial, to take in the facts without allowing my feelings to influence my judgment.
“What happened that spring before Mr. Haviland was killed?” I ask. “How did you find out about the affair?”
Mrs. Haviland takes a moment to collect her thoughts.
“That’s the part I try not to think about,” she says.
“Mark, your father, found out about the affair first. One of the foremen on a project had seen Jane and Isaac at a hotel bar in Concord, and they hadn’t left much to the imagination.
Mark confronted your mother and then came to see me, and .
. .” She pauses and shrugs. “I didn’t believe him.
Or maybe I didn’t want to hear what he had to say because it would have forced me to make too many choices.
I had a new baby and no job and no idea what I’d do if what Mark had said was true.
I’d gotten myself into a spot where I was completely dependent on Isaac financially, so I told your father I never wanted to see him again.
When Isaac came home that night, I let him into the house, and we acted as if none of it had happened, even though Jane had to have told him that Mark had confronted her.
” Mrs. Haviland sighs. “Talk about compartmentalization. The day Isaac was murdered, he tried to convince me to go to Idlewood for the Lantern Festival. I almost said yes.”
She rests her forehead on her palm as she sits with the memories, working through her own scenarios for what could have happened had she made different decisions, I imagine.
Eventually, she says, “I don’t blame myself for what happened.
Or, I mostly don’t. But what if I’d swallowed my pride and gone to the party? Maybe we wouldn’t be where we are now.”
“Paul said almost the same thing to me,” I say.
Mrs. Haviland sits up. “What does Paul know? He thinks he’s better than the rest of us, and has for as long as I’ve known him. I don’t owe him a thing.”
Something Seton mentioned in the boat two weeks ago flashes into my mind. “But you did owe Paul at one point,” I say. “He got you out of a bind. He lent you money for the Landing.”
“Paul lent Isaac money, not me. Isaac convinced Paul to invest the fifty grand he needed to finish the rehab on the Landing. The two of them tried to keep it secret from me.”
“Isaac showed up in New York, too,” I say. “He asked Freya to invest in the restaurant.”
“Isaac probably asked anyone who gave him the time of day for money. Once my husband got an idea in his head, good or bad, he went with it. But imagine this: What if Paul hadn’t given Isaac the money?
Isaac and Jane wouldn’t have had a reason to work together all spring, or to do anything together, for that matter, and none of us would be in this mess.
But I paid Paul back as soon as I figured out what had happened.
He was the last person in the world I wanted holding a favor over my head. ”
“Fifty thousand dollars is a lot,” I say. “Why would Paul loan that much money in the first place?”
Mrs. Haviland taps the table beside my phone. “I’ll help you spin a tale for the podcast. Maybe Paul had a secret and he’s the one who killed Isaac. If you could prove that, you’d make my day.”
I scowl at her. “If Paul killed your husband, then my mother and Reid covered for him for decades. Why would they do that?”
“They wouldn’t. That’s my point.” Mrs. Haviland rests a hand over mine.
“You lost your father. And now you’ve lost your mother, too, and you’re trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense, and it’s terrible in every possible way.
I get it, more than you realize. For decades, I’ve been trying to understand why my whole life zigged when I wish it had zagged.
On the night Isaac was killed, Seton was ten months old, and I was home, stewing because she was screaming her head off, and I didn’t have two nickels to rub together and felt trapped in a marriage I wanted to end.
The only way I could get her to sleep was to put her in the car, so I drove to Sunapee on the other side of the state, bought a soft-serve cone at the Anchorage, and parked by the lake there.
In the space of a week, I’d lost two of my best friends and been betrayed by my husband.
I’d never felt so tired or lonely or hopeless in my life.
I fell asleep, and it must have been midnight when I woke.
It took me an hour to drive home to Hero, and when I got to the house, the police were already there.
” She pauses, collecting herself. “And nothing’s been the same since.
I’d give anything to see Isaac again. Mark, too.
For your sake, I hope your father was here the other night. ”
I almost pause the recording for what I have to say next, but somehow I suspect Mrs. Haviland wants this conversation on the record, that she’s been waiting to tell this story for longer than I’ve been wanting to hear it. “You loved my father,” I say.
“I did love him. I still do, despite what he did.”
“When my mother first met you and my father, she assumed you were high school sweethearts. Were you dating?”
“You mean in high school?”
“Or later?”
“Did Jane tell you we had an affair?”
“She implied he had one with someone.”
Mrs. Haviland puts a hand to my cheek. “I wish Mark and I were sweethearts. But we weren’t.
Not in high school. Not ever. If your father had an affair with someone, it wasn’t with me.
” She stands. “I’ve talked enough for one day, and I have to get to work, anyway.
Good seeing you, Charlie. Remember, we promised to go water-skiing this summer. Come find me when you’re ready.”
As she heads up the ramp toward the restaurant, I call after her. “How did you know about the loan Paul gave to Isaac? You said they tried to keep it from you.”
“Your father and I studied accounting together in college, and I’m good when it comes to finances. Every bit of information I needed was in the books for the restaurant, buried in a spreadsheet. I should have been a forensic accountant. I’d be a lot richer now.”
That gives me an idea. “I could use your help.”