She extricated herself from Reid’s embrace. By then, the sun had begun to set behind the foothills surrounding the lake. She passed through a thicket of blueberry bushes and brambles, and when she emerged onto the shore, she kept her voice light. “What are you boys getting into?”
On the porch, Reid sensed both men had calmed in her presence, enough so that he went into the kitchen and lifted me from the bassinet. He balanced me on his shoulder and cooed in my ear as he returned to the porch and watched the three adults through the trees. My father’s shoulders had softened as he and Mr. Haviland spoke for a few moments. Finally, Mr. Haviland opened the door to the pickup truck, as if to leave. Then he turned to my mother, eyes closed. Later, Reid would tell the police officer, “Mr. Haviland looked like he wanted to kiss my mother. I think he called hermy love.”
My father flicked his wrist, a move so subtle that Reid barely noticed the flash of steel in the fading light. My mother waved her arms and screamed in our direction. Red, lots of red, bloomed from Mr. Haviland’s white T-shirt. He clutched at his stomach. My father held my mother by her curls with one fist, and the bloodstained knife with the other. She clawed at his face, twisting her foot around his until they collapsed to the ground, blood oozing from where my father had slashed at her face and hands with the knife.
The sun slid behind a hill. The whole world seemed to stop in that instant, as day turned to night and brilliant color faded to shadesof gray. Reid’s feet were rooted to the porch. I wonder what he might choose to do now if he could relive this moment. I wonder if he’s spent a lifetime asking how this day could have turned out differently had he run toward danger.
I started to cry.
That sound—a baby’s wail—bifurcated our world into a before, when we had a family, and an after, where our father’s choices have haunted us.
Around the lake, lights flickered. One by one, paper lanterns illuminated the darkness and lifted up off docks and into the night like tiny hot-air balloons. On the shore, my mother fought to wrest control of the knife. Blood coated her hands. My father hurled her to the ground. She grappled for his leg as he lunged toward the island, those blue eyes burning with rage.
He was coming for us next.
“We should run,” Reid said.
I suppose he was talking to me.
Chapter Two
Memorial Day weekend
“The intro’s good,” Julian says to me over the phone as I weave along the rural highway in New Hampshire. “I like how you reconstruct what youbelievehappened on the lake and question your own reliability.”
“I’m not reliable at all,” I say. “I was a baby.”
“You’ve done your research, though. The rest of the podcast can be about deconstructing your assumptions, but you’ll need to ask lots of questions to get to the core of what happened. Keep at it, especially when someone doesn’t want to answer.”
I pull off the highway and onto a long rural road. “No one will want to answer,” I say. “My mother and brother ... we never talk about what happened.”
“Charlie, you can do this,” Julian says. “Trust me. And if they don’t get angry—enraged, even—there isn’t a story worth telling. CrimeCon’s in September. Let’s aim to have a trailer ready by then.”
I click off the call.
Julian was two years ahead of me at prep school. Now he’s a producer at the public radio station in Boston where I’ve been stuck working as a production assistant since graduating college four years ago. Julian’s career trajectory, unlike mine, took off recently, when he developed a six-part series on the Boston Strangler, one that focused less on the gruesome nature of the crimes or the man convicted ofcommitting them, Albert DeSalvo, and more on the lives of his victims. The series did well and got picked up nationally, and when I told Julian about the murder on the lake, he proposed a podcast that I’d host and he’d produce. “What would it be about?” I asked. “My mother had an affair, and my father killed her lover. It’s pretty clear who the good guys and bad guys were.”
“There’s always more to tell,” Julian said. “It’s a murder in a small town where everyone knows each other. Besides, no one is all good or all bad. You have to find the right angle. A story like this one can catch on in the true-crime world.”
So, for the last few months, Julian’s worked his network to build interest, while I’ve mapped out how much of my story I know and who to speak with to fill in the gaps. This morning, I left my apartment in Somerville outside Boston and headed north to New Hampshire, where the whole thing began. Now, a quarter of a century after my father killed Isaac Haviland and left my mother to die, I’ll start asking questions. Maybe this project will jump-start my career, too, but what I really want is to learn who my father was before. That way, I’ll understand who he became.
And why.
I arrive at the end of an overgrown driveway and check the GPS. I’m in the middle of nowhere. I drop a pin and text the location to Julian.??If you don’t hear from me in the next fifteen minutes??, I write,??call in reinforcements.??
I hit send and hope the message goes through, then ease onto the driveway. Two enormous brown dogs trot out of the trees, following along until I reach a tidy farmhouse with pansies spilling from window boxes. A pair of motorcycles sits beside a shed. The dogs approach the car window, tails wagging, teeth bared. Sweet and salty. Which side will they opt for if I open the door?
I tap record on my phone. “Lisa Lawson’s house, Enstone, New Hampshire, twenty miles from the site of Isaac Haviland’s murder. Lisa is the surviving partner of Wendy Burrows, the lead detective in thehomicide investigation. Detective Burrows died a few months after the trail went cold in the search for my father. I found Lisa’s name listed in Wendy’s obituary.”
I crank down the car window an inch. Dog slobber coats the glass. “Are you friendly?” I ask.
One of the dogs whines.
Julian will appreciate the question and the response. It adds texture to the audio.
Behind me, someone taps the glass. I spin around. A woman stands on the other side of the car, pitchfork in hand. She must be well into her seventies, with a mound of silver hair piled on her head. I lean across the car and crack that window open. “Lisa Lawson?” I ask.
“Who’s asking?” the woman says. “And you can’t be lost, because this house is on the way to absolutely nowhere.”
