Chapter Forty
I sprint onto the trail, the beam of the flashlight bouncing in front of me as my feet find their way over rough ground, along the brook, and into the hills.
I grip a sapling, hauling myself up the incline as I picture the grid Freya drew in the ground earlier today, the names laid out: Reid, Duncan Gilcrest, my father, Paul Burke.
Hadley, too. And Andrea Haviland. What part does each of them play in what’s happened recently and what happened before?
How could Freya be tied to it all? And who could have made her send a text telling me she’d left for New York when her truck is here?
I start with the things I know to be true: My mother told Hadley she worried Reid would own his choices, and my brother broke into Freya’s apartment. The police have him on video. Later, Reid hid in the woods by Freya’s truck, and he ran when he was discovered. Now he’s dead.
But my brother wasn’t Freya’s stalker, at least not in the beginning, which I should have realized earlier.
Even if his bedroom walls were covered with her photos, he couldn’t have followed her to that mall in Upstate New York when she was on Eternal Flame, because Reid was a teenager.
He lived with my mother in the bungalow and attended Hero High School.
He also couldn’t have killed my mother, because he was with Blancy the night of the murder, right through the morning of the fire.
So why break into Freya’s apartment and steal a bottle of nail polish?
His only connection to Freya was the condo she lived in and the house she toyed with buying.
Earlier, Hadley told me she’d thought Freya was leaning toward making the move to Hero.
If Reid needed the money from the sale, he wouldn’t have wanted to frighten her into leaving for New York.
There’s Gilcrest, too. He worked security on the set of Eternal Flame, and he was the responding officer at Isaac Haviland’s murder, the one who enticed my brother, a terrified young boy, to row a boat to shore, or so he and Reid have claimed.
Twenty-five years later, Gilcrest oversaw an arson investigation that transitioned to homicide.
He and Freya met on the set of a TV show.
He convinced her to move to New Hampshire but refused to leave his wife and commit to the new relationship.
Then he tried to pin my mother’s murder on me when he believed he had a rival for Freya’s affections and started to lose control.
And Gilcrest has shown all along how much he demands control.
The trail levels out, and the sound of Ginger’s panicked yelps grows closer.
I reach the edge of the pasture and stop at the tree line.
Moonlight filters over the clearing, the wooden posts we used for target practice rising eerily across the rocky shooting range.
By the fieldstone wall, Ginger strains at the line Freya used earlier to keep her from bolting.
She stands at alert, her ears perked and eyes locked on an unseen target farther up the trail, toward the summit.
The dog seems unhurt, even as she howls.
I edge out of the trees and across the grass.
In a low voice, I say Freya’s name. Ginger turns on me, eyes narrowed, teeth bared, lunging until the line on her collar pulls taut, her every bark carrying a warning.
I offer a hand. “Nice girl,” I say, my voice quavering.
“Don’t you remember me? We slept together a few weeks ago. I gave you a treat earlier today.”
Muscles tense beneath Ginger’s rough tan-and-black coat. She snarls again.
I pray the line attached to her collar will hold.
One of Freya’s single-shot rifles lies on top of the fieldstone wall, broken open.
Ammunition spills from a paper box beside it.
Out in the field, aluminum cans sit atop their posts, ready to be taken out.
I picture the scene. Freya was here, in this field.
She must have returned earlier, while the police processed her truck for evidence.
She attached the line to Ginger’s collar, then loaded the rifle and covered her ears with headphones to start target practice.
“What happened?” I ask Ginger as I try reaching around the dog to retrieve the rifle. She lunges, teeth snapping.
“I could use some support right now,” I say.
Ginger’s having none of it.
“Fine,” I whisper. “Stay there. I’ll be back.”
I dash around the field, conducting a perimeter check.
As I move through the posts, Ginger’s barking slows, then stops.
By the time I return to the stone wall, she whimpers, and I’m almost convinced she might accept my commands.
That is, until I meet her eyes, and a low rumbling begins at the back of her throat. She crouches, her tail firm.
“We’ll keep our distance for now,” I say.
I glance farther up the trail, to where Ginger was focused when I arrived.
I imagine the summit where I watched the fire begin two weeks ago.
That old hunting cabin sits near the edge of the cliff, slowly giving itself back to the forest. I shine the flashlight along the base of the wall.
The beam lands on a black knapsack, hidden in the shadows of the stones, the same knapsack where Freya stored her phone.
I could use that phone now to call 9-1-1, even if I can’t unlock it to do anything else.
I retreat into the woods and return with a tree branch long enough to reach past Ginger’s snapping jaws.
I crouch inches from her teeth, maneuver the branch, and manage to snare one of the bag’s straps.
Ginger clamps her jaw on the branch and turns the exercise into a vicious game of tug-of-war. “Leave it!” I hiss.
She releases her end of the stick. I land flat on my ass but drag the bag toward me.
“You don’t make things easy,” I say as I root inside the knapsack for the phone and instead come up with a bag of dog treats. Ginger’s growls stop instantly.
“You’re hungry,” I say.
She whines.
I toss her a biscuit. She looks at where it lands, waiting for permission.
“Okay,” I say.
The biscuit disappears in a single chomp.
“Maybe we’re friends now,” I say, but as I take a step toward her, her haunches come off the ground and the snarls return.
So much for that.
I toss a second biscuit. This time, her tail nearly quivers into a wag, and her ears tilt forward.
Again, she sits until I give her permission to gobble down the treat, then returns right away to another sit, her mouth watering.
I eye the rifle. It would come in handy, especially if I find myself confronting a killer/stalker/kidnapper.
I throw a fistful of biscuits as far from the wall as possible, on the very edge of Ginger’s range, and make her wait until she froths at the mouth with anticipation. “Okay,” I say, and when she gallops toward the treats, I make my move.
But Ginger’s no fool. She lunges, jaws snapping as I scramble backward and barely avoid losing a chunk of my thigh.
“I get it,” I say. “You don’t appreciate being underestimated. Neither do I. I won’t try that again.”
The barking stops as suddenly as it started. Ginger whines, one of her ears flopping over. “What is it?” I ask. “I can’t take the mixed signals.”
She stares behind me with the same intensity I observed earlier. And in the sudden quiet, a twig snaps.
I spin around. “Who’s there?” I say, into the dark.
“Hold your hands where I can see them.”
Duncan Gilcrest emerges from the trees and into the moonlight, gun in hand. It’s pointed right at me.