Downstairs, the aroma of coffee fills the air. Freya adds four spoons of sugar and a glug of cream to her own mug and stirs. “How do you take your coffee, Harold?”
“Black is good. You want something decadent?” I say. “How about waffles?”
“Do I seem like someone who owns a waffle iron?”
Freya seems like someone who has anything she wants, though she clearly hasn’t forgiven me for mentioningHarold and Maude.
“Pancakes, then,” I say.
After I fumble through playing short-order cook, we head to the deck, carrying stacks of pancakes loaded with maple syrup and butter. In the marina, people have already begun to take their boats out forthe day. We settle at a teak table beneath a pergola covered in budding rose vines.
“Not a bad way to greet the morning,” I say.
“I kept my co-op in New York,” Freya says. “I can go back when I’m ready. But this is a great escape for now.”
“Is that what all the security is about? Escaping?”
“I have to be careful. I’m by myself. People know who I am.”
“You sleep with steel grates over the windows and wake up with a gun. That’s more than being careful.”
Freya nestles the mug between her hands. “There are plenty of weirdos out there, fans who blur the line between fiction and reality. It gets scary, and for a while I let it get the better of me. Besides, we both know bad things can happen in small towns. You’re the one who was asking about that case on the lake last night.”
Now would be the time to come clean and tell Freya who I am. But I’ve already dodged the truth, and Freya, with her guns and safe room and guard dog, doesn’t seem the type to forgive evasiveness. “People talk,” I say, “and they were talking about the episode of your show set on the lake during your set last night.”
“I worked over three hundred cases. They blend together.”
“You didn’t workanycases. You weren’t a real cop.”
Freya punches my arm. “Gina Shock wasn’t a cop. She was a special agent with the CBI.”
“Okay, what did Special Agent Gina Shock of the CBI make of the case on the lake? I mean, it was ripped from the headlines.”
“Ripped from the headlinesis from another show,” Freya says. “But, yeah, I got a feel for storylines after a while. Some came together easily and felt organic. Others, not so much. Those ones, we’d have to massage to make them plausible, no matter how much we pulled from real life. That story, the one about the husband who snaps and kills his wife’s lover and then goes after his own kids, it made no sense to me. Something about that case didn’t add up.”
Something about that case didn’t add up.
That’s a sound bite I should have captured.
I stand and shove my phone into my pocket. “Too much coffee,” I say.
In the bathroom, I splash water on my face and take three deep breaths. Something I can’t articulate is happening here; I feel it in my gut. I tap record on the phone. Whether I can use this audio or not, I need to capture it. Maybe I’ll convince Freya to sign a release later.
Outside, my every movement feels deliberate and suspicious, especially as I lay the phone face down on the table between us. “Something about that case didn’t add up?” I say, parroting Freya’s words.
I’ll have my own voice reflecting her earlier statement, even if that voice is shaking.
Freya sets her coffee aside. My heart pounds so loudly she must hear it.
“What’s got you on edge?” she asks.
“I woke up next to Freya Faith. It may not be a big deal for Ginger, but it is for me.”
“You’re not the first to find me intimidating, Harold.”
“I doubt I’ll be the last,” I say as I settle into the subterfuge of the situation. “But what didn’t add up? Was it because you knew so many of the players? I mean, you work with Paul Burke. He’s your manager. Wasn’t he at the lake house right before the murder happened?”
Freya scrutinizes me one more time, then seems to shake away her doubts. “I knew those people as a kid,” she says. “But the oddest thing was that I saw Isaac Haviland for the first time in years a few months before he was killed. He came to New York and was hanging around a shoot in the West Village. Security was tight on the set. He got roughed up a little bit, and I felt terrible about it, so I took him to a diner after we wrapped.” She rolls her eyes. “He was looking for money. He wanted me to invest in the Landing.”
