“Only a few people.”
“Who?”
“My producer at the station,” I say. “Seton.”
“Anyone else?”
“I talked to Lisa Lawson on my way to town. She was married to the lead investigator, Wendy Burrows. The one who died later that summer.”
“How did you find Lisa Lawson?”
“Wendy’s name was on the police reports,” I say, “and then it wasn’t. It didn’t take much of a leap to figure out something had happened to her. I found Lisa’s name listed in the obituary.”
“Wendy Burrows was a drunk six months from retirement,” Paul says. “She drove her car into the lake, and that was that. By then, the investigation had stalled anyway, and it never picked up again.”
Or maybe Wendy Burrows got too close to solving the case.
“I get it, Charlie,” Paul says, staring into the fire. “You have questions, and you want answers. I’d feel the same way if I were in your place. I’ll tell you this much: Your father was a friend. A good friend. And what happened here on the lake, it doesn’t leave you. Ever. Especially at night, when you can’t sleep.”
I wait for Paul to continue.
“I think about what I could have done differently,” he says, eventually. “How another choice could have altered our fates. I’d comein from New York that morning and hadn’t heard the local gossip about your mother’s affair with Isaac Haviland. All I knew was that Andrea and Isaac didn’t show up on the dock here at Idlewood, and the tension between your parents was palpable. But instead of sticking around, I paddled away.”
“Would my father have listened to you?”
“Who knows? But with anything like this, the trick is to cut out the evil before it takes root, to eliminate the darkest parts. Your father showed his dark side that night, but what if I’d brought him toward the light. Or what if I’d convinced Isaac to leave. Or what if I’d stuffed a dozen deviled eggs into my mouth, tripped off the dock, and let everyone forget how angry they were at each other. Or what if—” Paul stops. “See how this works? I won’t get much sleep tonight. Probably none of us will.”
I know I won’t.
“What does Seton say about your project?” Paul asks. “Is she working with you?”
“God, no,” I say. “She tore me a new one when she found out what I was doing. And we don’t discuss her father, or mine. It’s our unspoken agreement.”
“Not a bad strategy. The less said about some things, the better. Learn from that friendship.” Paul stands and brushes pine needles from his jeans. “Are you going to ask Seton on a date this summer?”
I’m surprised Paul knows to ask, since I’m not sure myself what’s going on between the two of us. “There’s nothing between Seton and me.”
“Keep telling yourself that.”
Paul’s footsteps fade into the night, but his words linger—the possibilities, the alternate paths our lives could have taken if one small thing had gone differently that day. Maybe my father would be here right now. Maybe Seton and I would have gone on that date. Or maybe our lives would have diverged long ago, as though we’d never met.
When I return to the cottage, I make my way through the house as quietly as I can, moving across the warped wooden floors and up the narrow stairs to the long corridor lined with bedrooms. As I pass my mother’s darkened room, a faint, skunky odor lingers in the air, and a light clicks on. “Charlie?” my mother says.
I freeze like a teenager sneaking in after a night of drinking at Burkehaven.
“I hear you breathing,” my mother says.
I’ll have to face her eventually.
I tap open the door. She sits up, her back resting against the brass bed frame, her curls cascading around her shoulders.
“Are you talking to me?” I ask.
She lights a bud. “I’ve mellowed out,” she says, offering me the pipe.
“Not tonight. I’m running in the morning. And what would Grandpa Tony say?”
She laughs, coughing on the exhale. “He’d find a way to blame Hadley.”
