Chapter Thirty
“What’s that about a loan, Charlie?” Gilcrest says to me as he completes the climb up the hill, the lake extending to the horizon behind him. “Is Seton hitting you up for money again?”
Paul catches my eye. “It’s nothing, Duncan,” he says. “Charlie’s taking a loan against his mother’s estate to pay his hospital bills while I get things settled. Perfectly standard.”
“Must be nice to have a well to draw from,” Gilcrest says.
I brush past the detective without answering. “I’ll see you around, Paul,” I say.
“By the way, thanks for the lead,” Gilcrest calls after me. “I was over at Moodey Lumber this morning. Vance told me what he could about your mother.”
I turn, taking a few steps backward over the uneven ground.
Gilcrest looms a few feet above me, hair tousled, hips thrust forward with practiced ease, testosterone exuding from his very essence.
He’s letting me know Freya reported on our day together and anything I tell her will get back to him one way or another. “You’re playing good cop,” I say.
“I am a good cop,” Gilcrest says. “How’s the aim? Have you managed to hit the target yet?”
“I’ll let you know,” I say.
Gilcrest is also making sure I understand he’s in control.
I leave the detective with Paul and descend through the field. At my car, I send a text to Freya: Meet me in our spot.
An hour later, Freya emerges from the hiking trail onto the shooting range.
She carries the two rifles slung over her shoulder.
Ginger trots along beside her. The dog growls and wags her tail when she sees me, as though she doesn’t know whether to attack.
“Release,” Freya says, making the decision for her.
I roll onto the ground and wrestle with the dog while Freya heads into the field to set up aluminum cans as targets. When she returns, I take the bag of treats from my coat pocket.
“Make her earn it,” Freya says.
I palm one of the treats. Ginger’s haunches hit the ground, and then she swallows the biscuit in one bite.
“Good girl,” I say, scratching her behind the ears. “I’ll get you to trust me. Maybe we can be friends.”
“More like frenemies,” Freya says, loading one of the rifles, then attaching the line to Ginger’s collar before firing into the range.
“No cigarette?” I ask.
“I think I quit,” Freya says, leaning the rifle against the stone wall. “I’ve earned it.”
I get up from the ground. I’m not sure how I’m supposed to greet Freya—a peck on the cheek or a quick hug or something more—so I offer a hand.
She almost laughs. “Nice to meet you, sir,” she says, adding a nod to a firm handshake, then releasing Ginger from the line. “Go play,” she says to the dog, who dashes into the woods after a squirrel.
“I saw your boyfriend,” I say. “He came to the farm to talk to Paul.”
I tell her about my conversation with Andrea Haviland earlier this morning and that I made up with Seton while out in the helicopter.
“That was you flying over Hadley and me when we were on the lake,” Freya says.
“Did you learn anything from her?”
“Not really. We had forty years of catching up to do.”
I lift one of the guns and find an aluminum can in the sight.
The weapon still feels dangerous pressed into my shoulder, even with an empty chamber.
“It’s as though I’m watching myself move through my own story while I gather pieces and try to fit them together.
And I’m not sure what the pieces are right now, because nothing seems to make sense. ”
“Stay here,” Freya says, disappearing into the trees and returning with a long stick she uses to scratch a grid in the muddy ground.
“On Scene of the Crime, Gina Shock would gather the CBI team at a whiteboard after the mid-episode break, especially if the story was complex. We’d bat around ideas, but it was also a way to refresh the audience on who the suspects were. So, who are our suspects?”
Only everyone I know. And it feels coldhearted to reduce my mother’s murder to a grid, but I also want to learn what happened. “Start with me,” I say. “Gilcrest did.”
Freya scratches Harold into the grid. “Motive?” she asks.
I walk her through my theory that my mother planned to put Idlewood into conservation.
“Getting cut out of a big inheritance, not bad.” Freya adds an X to the Motive column. “Means: a tree limb; opportunity: you were at the scene.”
“But I didn’t do it,” I say.
Freya x-es out my name.
“You’ll take my word for it?” I ask.
“Gina wouldn’t, but I will. And eliminating suspects is as helpful as identifying them. Your brother has the exact same motive as you: money. But not necessarily the same means or opportunity.”
She adds Reid’s name to the grid, but seeing my brother as part of a list of suspects makes me uncomfortable, especially when the list—so far—only consists of one other person.
“It was probably a stranger,” I say.
“Maybe,” Freya says, placing a question mark at the bottom of the grid.
“But not very satisfying, story wise. A random act of violence would never make it out of the writers’ room.
What about our friend Vance Moodey at the lumberyard, with his handy two-by-fours?
Motive could be greed, jealousy, envy, rage.
He could be a serial killer. We only have his word he was dating your mother, and even if they were dating, maybe she met him at Burkehaven to break things off and he lost his temper. ”
“Gilcrest told me he went to see Vance this morning,” I say.
Freya pauses. “Yeah, Duncan’s a real cop, so if I have a theory about a crime, I have to tell him, whether he’s earned it or not.”
Duly noted.
I take the stick from her and scratch Vance’s name beneath mine. “And my father,” I say, adding his name, too.
Freya clucks her tongue. “Viewers love stories where the past comes around and connects to the present. This could be as easy as discovery. Maybe your mother found out your father was alive and threatened to expose him. Your father could have killed your mother, started the fire, and retreated into the trees when he saw Andrea Haviland approaching in the boat. Then, when you arrived, he could have attacked you with the tree limb.” Freya adds three check marks next to my father’s initials.
“Motive, means, and opportunity equals a viable suspect.”
She’s getting a little too into this. “We’re not in the writers’ room,” I say.
“Sorry,” Freya says, touching my arm as she seems to search for something to say. “How are you feeling, anyway?”
Tired of talking about how I feel. “Let’s keep going,” I say. “But honestly, focusing on the crime helps me forget about the rest of it. I know it doesn’t make sense, but at least I’m doing something.”
“Back to your father, then,” Freya says.
“On the show, we’d work your father into the plot early in the episode, but we’d put him aside as a long-shot theory.
One of the junior agents would pursue it, while Gina Shock followed other leads.
Your father would come back in the last act, when he’d become the main focus of the investigation. ”
“Since this isn’t a TV show,” I say, “maybe we should keep him in our sights.”
“Or,” Freya says, “maybe there’s another storyline we’re forgetting, one your dad’s distracting us from, and that storyline will come around and connect. What did Andrea Haviland have to say about your father?”
“She insists she hasn’t seen him since he disappeared.”
“Plus, there’s the recording showing her arriving at the scene after the fire started. No opportunity.”
I tell Freya Paul’s theory that Mrs. Haviland left the single camera in place on purpose so she could start the fire and be recorded arriving on scene.
“That’s a lot of detail to keep track of,” Freya says, adding Mrs. Haviland’s name to the grid. “For it to work, we’d have to shoot a flashback, maybe in black and white. The explanation’s too convoluted otherwise.”
“God forbid we shoot a flashback,” I mumble, though it gives me an idea. I pull up the audio files on my phone. “I have my own flashback right here. My mother and I talked the night before . . . the night before everything happened.”
I hit play as my mother’s voice washes over me: Good marriages don’t end. And bad marriages don’t have a good guy and a bad guy. We all play our parts. I played mine, and so did your father.
I hit pause.
“Doesn’t that sound as if my father had an affair, too?” I ask. “Mrs. Haviland denied it was her. I don’t know who to believe anymore, and Seton—”
I add Seton’s initials to the grid, and this time it really does feel like a betrayal. “She’s been against the podcast since the moment I told her about it.”
“She doesn’t want to dig up the past,” Freya says.
“Or she’s protecting someone,” I say. “Seton and Mrs. Haviland tell each other everything. Could Seton know something the rest of us don’t?” I shiver. “What if Seton is my half sister?”
“That’s a little too soap opera, even for me,” Freya says. “And if it were true, my guess is your mothers would have kept you very, very far away from each other. Let me hear that recording again.”
I hit play.
“Your mother’s saying that both your parents did things they shouldn’t have, but she doesn’t say your father had an affair. He could have been a drug addict or a drunk or worse.”
I draw a line connecting Mrs. Haviland’s name to my father’s. “Or maybe the simplest explanation is he slept with an old friend.”
Freya’s eyes crease in thought as she calls to Ginger.
The dog barrels from the trees and sits at attention.
Freya attaches the line to her collar, loads the rifle, and shoots.
“When Hadley and I were out on the boat this morning, I got to thinking about firsts and lasts. Sometimes you know they’re happening, and sometimes you don’t see them until they’re far off in the rearview mirror.
Like that night we met at the Landing. That was a first for us.
When we talked on the sidewalk in the rain, I never would have guessed we’d be here together in the woods two weeks later. ”
Freya breaks open the rifle again, loads the chamber, and fires. This time, she misses the target.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
She pops out the spent casing. “I had a memory come back to me right this very moment, fully formed, something I haven’t thought about in decades.
The last time my family stayed at Burkehaven was the year before I started college.
I don’t think any of us knew we wouldn’t return, or that we’d lose touch with so many of the people we’d spent summers with.
Hadley and I were good friends. And even though we only saw each other for two weeks each summer, I knew she’d be part of my time here.
We couldn’t have known the last time we spoke to each other would be the last time, that I’d blink and decades would melt away. ”
Freya lays the rifle on the stone wall.
“I took the path to Idlewood on our last day,” she continues.
“Hadley and I went swimming. It was hot, and the sun was beating down on us, and the water felt silky against my skin, and it was one of those days that should never have ended. Hadley’s a year older than I am, so she’d been out to California already for her first year of college.
For as long as I’d known her, she’d talked about leaving New Hampshire.
She wanted to travel the world, and by then I knew I wanted to live in New York, to be an artist. She’d instilled a desire for independence in me. ”
“You both got what you wanted,” I say.
“That’s just it,” Freya says. “I’m glad she got what she wanted.
It was a relief to learn that, actually, because that last time I spoke to your aunt, her whole outlook had changed.
As we floated in the lake, she was smiling and laughing in a way I hadn’t seen before.
She told me she was considering staying in Hero and transferring to Kingston State.
” Freya’s eyes suddenly focus. “It’s a snapshot in time, a single moment Hadley probably doesn’t remember. ”
“Hadley didn’t transfer to Kingston State,” I say. “She went to Berkeley and finished med school at UCSF. I can’t imagine her staying in Hero. She makes fun of it the whole time she’s here.”
“But she had a boyfriend that summer,” Freya says. “Or a boy she was obsessed with talking about.” She crosses over to the grid and adds Hadley’s name beneath Andrea Haviland’s. Then she draws a line connecting Hadley to my father. “Her boyfriend was Mark Kilgore. Your father.”