“Did you give him any?”
“I gave him a hundred bucks and got rid of him as soon as I figured out what was going on.” Freya shakes her head. “Isaac weirded me out,but that’s not the part of the story I can’t reconcile. When we shotScene of the Crime, I used to hang out in the writers’ room and drive them crazy questioning plots. There were so many holes in the Idlewood storyline—”
“Some guy’s wife is having an affair,” I say. “He finds out and loses it. That story’s been told a thousand times.”
Freya runs a hand along Ginger’s back. “Sure, the setup was straightforward enough: Jane Reid has an affair with Isaac Haviland while they’re working on rehabbing the Landing. Plenty of my cases involved someone sleeping with someone they shouldn’t, and adultery’s the oldest story there is.”
“You don’t have any cases,” I remind her. “You’re an actor.”
“Good actors immerse themselves in their roles, and I played Gina Shock for thirteen years. I barely know where she ends and I begin. But what happened next?”
“Mark Kilgore killed Isaac Haviland and fled the scene once he realized what he’d done.”
As soon as I hear myself say my father’s name, I wish I hadn’t. I should have called himthat guyorthe husband. I know way too much about this case for a casual twenty-six-year-old observer, but Freya seems to miss my fumble.
“Follow the evidence,” she says. “That’s what Gina Shock would tell you. Mark Kilgore was cooking dinner for his family. His older son was studying at the kitchen table. They were listening to Janet Jackson. Jane Reid had set up paper lanterns on the dock for the Lantern Festival. What happened next?”
I know exactly what happened next—Isaac Haviland showed up and called my mother’s name across the cove—but I won’t make the mistake of showing too much familiarity again. “I’m fuzzy on the details.”
“Mark Kilgore leaves the house with a chef’s knife and confronts his wife’s lover.”
I don’t see the problem. “And?” I say.
Freya sits up. “When you’re putting together a show, it has to hang together. If there’s the tiniest blip in logic, the online lunatics rip the story to shreds. So, a character’s having an affair with some guy’s wife. He drives out to the house, and the guy—the one he’s betrayed—charges out of the trees with a chef’s knife. What should the character do?”
Nowadays, he’d dial 9-1-1, but there were no cell phones then, or not ones that got reception at Idlewood. “He could get in the car and lock the doors,” I say. “Or maybe the guy held the knife behind his back. Or maybe Isaac Haviland was concerned about Jane and the kids.”
“Let’s say all that’s true. We’d have to work the concern into dialogue, but what happened next?”
This time I don’t fumble. “All I know is what I heard at the bar last night.”
Freya waits for me to continue.
“Fine,” I say. “Jane Reid left her kids on the island and tried defusing the situation. She asked Isaac Haviland to leave, and he was nearly in his car when he called hermy love.”
“That’s when Mark lost it,” Freya says. “He stabbed Isaac in the gut, and when Jane tried to intervene, he stabbed her, too.”
Sounds like great TV. Drama. Intense emotion. Rash decisions. “Isn’t this the kind of story your whole show was built on?”
“When things followed a certain logic.”
“Murder doesn’t follow logic.”
“Each murder has its own logic. And here’s something else we had to change for the show: Isaac Haviland crawled into the woods to escape. The police found him later, propped up against a tree, where he’d bled out, but if Mark was so intent on killing Isaac, why would he let him escape? On the show, we finished off the victim right away. And there’s the whole thing with the preteen and the baby in the rowboat.”
Now she’s questioningmystory. “That’s the part everyone remembers,” I say. “Two kids in a rowboat while paper lanterns lit up the sky. I mean, you used that image on the show.”
“It couldn’t have been more cinematic,” Freya says. “But Mark stabbed his wife and left her to drag herself through the woods to her sister’s house? Why would he lethergo?”
“Because he realized what he’d done and was horrified with himself.”
“But if you try your best to murder someone in cold blood, you don’t feel bad about it andthenthreaten to also kill yourown children. Once you find your conscience, it’s there and you have to deal with it.”
“Maybe he didn’t realize his wife was still alive.”
Freya waves a hand. “That could be the case, and all of these details are small, and one or two might have been fine in the final storyline, but not all. Audiences are smarter than you think they are. We had to kill off the boyfriendandthe wife to make the story plausible. And let’s not forget about the detective who died in the middle of the investigation. What’s her name? Wendy something.”
“She was in a car accident,” I say.
