Chapter Forty-Four
Andrea Haviland pulls the boat around in an arc while I hold the handle in both hands. When the line goes taut, I give the signal, she revs the engine, and I lift out of the water on both skis. I kick one ski off and balance on the other as I angle in and out of the wake.
In the last two weeks, I’ve learned more about Isaac Haviland’s murder, and that not much of what I’ve assumed or been told for most of my life was true.
My parents didn’t have cocktails with Paul on the dock, though my mother asked him to tell the police they had because it supported her narrative.
What really happened was that my parents got into an argument that afternoon while my father prepped the Bolognese.
After he stormed off the island and drove away in the Volvo, my mother finished cooking and went to look for him in her own car, with me strapped into my car seat.
Sometime after she left, Mr. Haviland came to the island, where Reid was working on his homework.
No one knows what happened between them, but Reid used a chef’s knife to kill Mr. Haviland.
My mother returned to Idlewood and found Reid, and when she tried to take the knife from him, they struggled, and Reid stabbed her.
He took me from the car and fled in the rowboat, while my mother dragged herself through the woods to escape.
Much of this we’ve learned from Paul, who, once he began to tell his story, couldn’t stop, no matter what his own lawyer advised. It was as though telling the story helped cleanse him of his sins.
As a teenager, Paul became fixated on Freya, a secret he shared with Isaac only after Isaac found the necklace he had stolen.
Paul was the one who followed Freya to that Westchester mall when she was on Eternal Flame and left his first message on her windshield.
He became addicted to the power that came from terrifying her.
He even leaked compromising photos to a tabloid of Freya’s husband with another woman, which led to the end of Freya’s marriage.
Once Freya told Isaac about being stalked, it didn’t take much for him to connect Paul to the incidents.
He used that information to blackmail Paul into financing the Landing, but when Paul found out about my mother’s affair with Isaac, he convinced Reid that the only way to save his family was to remove Isaac as a threat.
To cut out the darkness.
Reid was twelve years old when he killed Isaac, and Isaac was strong and in shape, so I suspect Paul helped, though he hasn’t admitted that part to the police yet. Maybe he will, eventually.
Mrs. Haviland makes a sharp turn, the boat careening across the water.
I ride the wake, flying up in the air, but miss the landing as I release the handle and sink into the cool water.
I lie on my back and face the sky, letting the life jacket do the work of keeping me afloat until Mrs. Haviland pulls up beside me and we swap places.
I take the helm and wait for her to signal with a thumbs-up before pushing the throttle forward.
After she finishes her turn, I say, “I should get back, unless you want to go again.”
“Another day,” she says, handing me the ski and hauling herself out of the water. We pull in the line and pick up the second ski. Before Mrs. Haviland can rev the engine for the return trip, I touch her arm. “Did you see my father at that soccer game?” I ask.
“Way back when?” she says. “I didn’t, though I wish I had. All these years, I believed your father was dead.”
“You didn’t drive him to the White Mountains or help him escape.”
“Nothing like that,” she says. “Are you recording?”
“No,” I say.
“Well, here’s my secret, and I’ll deny this if you repeat it to anyone, but I’m lucky I missed that one camera at Burkehaven when I smashed the other ones with a sledgehammer. If I hadn’t, I might be in jail right now.” She glances at me out of the corner of her eye, waiting for my reaction.
“You said you didn’t do it,” I say, shoving her shoulder. With all the lies and omissions I’ve sorted through recently, this one should hardly register, but it feels personal. “I defended you!”
“That’s why I’m telling you now. I don’t want a secret hanging between us.”
“Fine,” I say. “I suppose I’ll give you this one. Were you planning something for Burkehaven like you did with Rocky Nook? Were you going to block the development?”
Mrs. Haviland considers the question for a moment.
“People think I’m a crazy old lady,” she says.
“But I can still water-ski, and I get my own way most of the time. I’d have figured out how to stop that project.
” She stows the skis in the keel and sits behind the steering wheel.
“There’s something else I should tell you: I found those payments from Paul in Isaac’s ledgers a few weeks after Isaac died and assumed they were loans. ”
“You already told me that,” I say. “You found the loans and paid them back.”
“There’s more, though. I didn’t have the fifty grand to pay Paul.
I didn’t have fifty cents, for that matter, but I had a one-year-old child and a business to run.
There were six deposits in total, all under ten thousand dollars, right below the amount that would trigger the IRS.
The deposits were suspicious enough that when Paul brought up the loan, I told him his secret was safe with me.
That’s all I said. Nothing else. He never mentioned the money again.
” The lines around Mrs. Haviland’s eyes crease into a smile.
“That’s why Paul couldn’t stand me. He thought I knew something I didn’t.
He thought I knew what had happened on the lake.
” She shoves the throttle forward, and we shoot across the water. “I’m lucky to be alive.”
At the marina, I help Mrs. Haviland unload and cover the boat and then follow her up the ramp toward the Landing.
“You coming in for breakfast?” she asks.
“Is he here?”
“Probably.”
The bells over the door ring. Groups of friends gather at tables and line up to place orders.
Blancy works the counter and acknowledges me with a nod, while Mrs. Haviland kisses my cheek and makes me promise to go water-skiing again soon.
Then she says hello to my father and retreats to the kitchen.
Mark Kilgore perches at the counter, on the same stool where he sat weeks earlier, when he traveled to Hero, concerned because my mother hadn’t met him in Finstock.
They’d spent years keeping in contact with burner phones and meeting up when they could.
My father lived off the grid in a tiny house on a piece of property long forgotten after it was seized by eminent domain from Reid Construction for a failed highway project.
My mother provided cash for him to live on by skimming profits from the firm.
Now I slide onto the stool beside him, as I have most mornings in the week since he was released from the hospital. He wears the same glasses, but a neat crew cut has replaced the ponytail. “You’re here,” he says.
“Where else would I be?” I say as Blancy brings me a mug of coffee.
“What about work?” he asks. “They must want you at the radio station.”
I took another two-week leave after what happened.
Technically I’m due in the office next week, but I won’t trust Julian after he unleashed the podcast on the world, and I have the estate to sort out and the construction firm to run.
I have to untangle the finances to see who’s owed what, and who I can hold off for a bit longer.
As Reid told me, it’s a shell game, one I suspect I can make work.
My father and I are feeling each other out.
I haven’t referred to him as anything yet, not sure whether I should call him Mark or Dad or something else.
Most mornings, we pick up our conversation exactly where we left off the day before.
He’s already told me about returning to Idlewood on the evening Isaac Haviland was killed.
He found my mother slumped on the road halfway to the bungalow, bleeding from the knife wound.
“I started the argument with her,” he told me.
“I couldn’t let go of the affair, or how betrayed I felt, which wasn’t fair to Jane, not by a long run, not after the things I’d done.
I left to cool off. By the time I returned—”
He didn’t complete the thought. “I couldn’t turn Reid in,” he said. “I couldn’t let his whole life be ruined because of his parents’ mistakes. So I ran and took the blame.”
Yesterday, my father told me he came to Idlewood the night Reid drowned to talk to him—to confront him, really.
“I worried he’d killed your mother,” my father said, staring at the counter as he spoke.
“But Reid was dead when I got there. You showed up a few moments after I did, and I didn’t know what to do.
I came to the Landing first to find Andrea, but I saw her working in the kitchen and realized I’d already done her enough harm.
After I talked to Blancy, I went to Burkehaven Farm.
Living off the grid was tolerable when your mother came to visit, when there was something to look forward to, but after Jane died .
. . I couldn’t face being on my own. I might as well have been in prison.
I was ready to turn myself in and thought Paul could help.
When I got to the farmhouse, Paul was in the kitchen, sopping wet. ”
Something clicked for my father in that moment. The players had been cut away one by one—first my mother, then Reid, until only Paul remained. “I confronted him,” my father said. “It didn’t take him long to confess. Or to pull a knife on me.”
Today, I take a long sip of my coffee. “What if you’d let Reid take the blame for his choices?”