Chapter Thirty-One
I scuff Hadley’s name from the grid of suspects with the toe of my shoe. While I’m at it, I erase Seton’s name, too. “Hadley couldn’t have dated my father,” I say. “He was too old. He’d never have dated a kid like her.”
“Stay objective, Harold,” Freya says. “And stick to the facts. You don’t know your father or what he’d do, but if I remember correctly, your father was a junior at Kingston State that year, two years older than Hadley, who’d just finished her freshman year at Berkeley.
If I was eighteen, she was nineteen, and he’d have been twenty-one. Seems okay to me.”
She’s right, of course. My mother was four years older than her sister, and my father was right between them.
“If you talked to your father at the Landing,” Freya says, “he’s either managed to live on the lam on his own, or someone’s been helping him.
Maybe it’s Hadley: the sad sister with the long, unrequited crush on her brother-in-law.
He gets himself in trouble and needs help.
Maybe he knew she had feelings for him and exploited them to manipulate her. ”
“Men don’t manipulate Hadley,” I say. “And, reminder, she was in Kosovo the night Isaac Haviland was killed, so she wasn’t here to hide my father, no matter what she felt about him.”
“She could have flown home without telling anyone.”
“Hadley flies halfway around the world, rents a car, drives to New Hampshire to . . . what? Seduce my father? And she manages to fake a photo showing her surrounded by eyewitnesses who can attest to her being in Kosovo. I mean, did Photoshop exist in 2001?”
“Believe me, Photoshop existed long before 2001. The producers used it on my publicity stills all the time.”
“Well, that’s a pretty far-fetched scenario, even for Scene of the Crime.”
“My show was not far-fetched. And you’re pretty protective of Hadley.”
“What can I say? She’s my cool aunt. And she makes me feel special.”
“And she’s my cool friend, so I’d be glad to clear her name, but didn’t you tell me Hadley came home from Kosovo as soon as she heard what happened here, and stayed all summer?
Even if she’d been out of the country on the night of the murder, Mark could have found her after she returned.
Maybe she helped him get set up in a new life.
” Freya returns Hadley’s name to the grid. “Who’s left?”
“Paul Burke,” I say.
“How well do you know him?”
“How well do you know him?” I ask.
“Are you asking if we dated?”
“It could be an interesting plot twist.”
“Paul and I have a professional relationship, and I suppose we’re friends, too,” Freya says.
“But that’s all. I mean, I’ve known him most of my life.
He handles my relatives, making sure they stay happy and out of my hair with about a thousand trusts he manages.
Scene of the Crime was good to me. The residuals roll in, and my money rolls out.
You wouldn’t believe how much it costs to be rich.
He’s helped me with some thorny issues over the years, too, especially my divorce.
It was rough when those photos of my ex-husband hit the tabloids—they were pretty racy—and I had to be on set with him until we killed off the character.
Paul was there, watching out for me. We used to spend a lot of time together before I met Duncan, especially after I left Scene of the Crime.
So that’s my relationship with him. What’s yours? ”
“He stepped in with my father being gone,” I say, adding his name to the grid.
“Motive?” Freya asks.
I add a question mark as I review the conversation I had with Paul earlier.
I have a loyalty to him like I do with Hadley, but he was also keeping something from me when we talked.
That thing—the loan to Mrs. Haviland—had more to do with the past than the present.
“We keep asking if there could be a connection between Isaac Haviland’s murder and what happened to my mother,” I say.
“Two violent deaths in one tight-knit group,” Freya says.
I add Isaac Haviland’s name to the grid. “Paul lent Isaac fifty grand.”
“That’s not chump change,” Freya says.
“Paul wasn’t at Idlewood when my father stabbed Isaac Haviland.
It’s in the police reports. He’d gone to a party his parents were throwing at Burkehaven, and there were witnesses who confirmed he was there the whole time.
But the two properties are connected through the woods, and it only takes two or three minutes to run the path from Idlewood to Burkehaven. I do it most mornings.”
“So, questionable opportunity,” Freya says. “But if Paul killed Isaac Haviland and framed your father, why would your mother have covered for him?”
And why would Reid have told the police my father killed Isaac? It’s the same argument I made to Mrs. Haviland earlier.
“We could add Duncan to the mix, too,” Freya says. “He was the responding officer at the Haviland murder, and now he’s working this case years later.”
“I don’t see a motive,” I say.
“That’s big of you.”
Score one for Charlie Kilgore.
I smile at Freya, forgetting for an instant that these aren’t storylines, and this isn’t a TV episode. But that grief comes out of hiding all over again, nearly knocking me off my feet. I rest my palms on the stone wall and gasp for breath. “Wow,” I say, the smile gone.
“Let’s take a break,” Freya says. “Duncan has a whole team working on solving this case. We don’t have to do this.”
We do, though. Or I have to.
I thought I wanted to know what happened next, who my father was, how he could have ruined his whole life in a single instant of rage, but what I need is to understand where I belong, how I’ve fit into this story for all these years, and what’s kept me on the outside, looking in.
“What if I asked the wrong question?” I say.
“If I’d kept my mouth shut and not run around trying to tell this story, would my mother be alive? ”
“You can’t own someone else’s terrible decision,” Freya says. “Whether the choice was made twenty-five years ago, or twenty-five minutes ago, the choice was theirs to make.”
We gather the rifles and retrieve the aluminum cans from the shooting range.
Freya releases Ginger from the line, and we make our way down the trail.
When we reach the stream, a text beeps into my phone.
Then another. And another. I glance at the screen.
A text from Julian sits over all the others.
This thing is gaining traction! he writes.
I click his name. He picks up on the first ring. “We’re at two thousand downloads,” he says.
“Of what?” I ask.
“I edited together some of your narration,” Julian says. “There’s a story here! I posted a teaser for the podcast.”
Right then, a growl begins at the back of Ginger’s throat.
“What’s wrong?” Freya says to her.
The dog takes off toward the trailhead. Freya swears and chases after her.
I imagine the other texts on my phone, from Reid and Paul—from Seton—each expressing some version of betrayal. “Take the teaser down,” I say to Julian. “Now. Right now!”
Then I disconnect the call, sling the rifle over my shoulder, and run down the path toward the road, my boots pounding through mud. A few moments later, I emerge from the trees. Freya stands beside Ginger, her hand on the dog’s collar.
“I’m going to strangle my producer,” I say, between gasps.
Freya doesn’t speak. I follow her gaze. Sun glints off her truck’s windshield, where Welcome Home has been smeared in what looks like blue paint. “He’s back,” Freya says.
I search the forest for whoever she means. Something moves in the trees. I lift the rifle and find the scope as someone tackles me from behind.