I stare at the deck and nod.
“Good. Now get out of my house.”
My stomach is in knots as Ginger follows on my heels, a growl forming at the back of her throat. I find my coat in the front closet and make sure I have my father’s pint glass from last night. Then I get in the elevator with the detective. Testosterone radiates off him as he lets me stew in my own silent misery. Outside, I take off toward the Landing.
“I’ll drive you,” Gilcrest says, in a way that doesn’t give me much choice but to follow him to his SUV. He pulls away from the condo complex, waving a hand out the window toward Freya, who watchesimpassively from her deck. As we turn onto the street, Paul Burke swerves by in his own car and takes the spot Gilcrest vacated. I dread finding out what Freya will say to Paul about me, or how her choice words will get filtered and disseminated. No matter what, by the time we have dinner tonight, I’ll be the butt of every joke.
“Here’s a tip,” Gilcrest says. “Be up front with people. It’s one of the basic tenets of police work. If you’d asked, Freya would have given you an interview. She loves attention, like any actor, but she’s not one to forgive, especially if you step on her privacy.”
I don’t need Duncan Gilcrest to tell me how much I messed up. All I want is to get out of this car and into my boat and away from this whole mess, but as he pulls around the marina and onto Main Street, he passes right by the Landing.
“Blancy can wait another half hour for you to move the boat,” Gilcrest says. “I want to make sure I understand what happened yesterday.”
He speeds along the lake, eventually turning into the woods at the bungalow. When he comes to the fork in the road, he stops the SUV and swivels toward me. Here, we’re alone, and the sun barely penetrates the thick canopy of trees. Maybe the detective wants to give me a reason to stay away from his woman. I press my back to the door, ready to tumble out and run for my life.
Instead, Gilcrest says, “I wish I was meeting you under different circumstances, Charlie. It must have been tough to grow up with all this baggage hanging over your head. Trauma can follow you, whether you know it or not. I get why you’re working on this podcast. Who have you talked to so far?”
“Freya, mostly,” I say. “But you saw what happened there. I doubt she’ll let me talk to her again.”
“You can record me,” Gilcrest says.
“Really?” I say.
“I’ve done hundreds of podcasts. And let me know what else I can do to help. Maybe we could get a book deal or a TV series. It’s a pretty compelling story.”
What would Julian say if I wound up beating him to a book deal? I lay my phone on the SUV’s console. “Detective Duncan Gilcrest,” I say. “Responding officer to the Idlewood Murders.”
Gilcrest leans over the phone. “Hi, guys,” he says.
“I’ve read about what happened,” I say. “But you were there. An eyewitness to the aftermath.”
“I’d been on the job for a week,” Gilcrest says. “I’d graduated from Columbia the previous fall and moved back here from New York.”
“You went to Columbia?”
“Try not to sound so surprised.” Gilcrest touches pause on the screen. “I’ll need a copy of the recording when we finish. And no funny business in the editing room. You have to make me sound good.”
“I will,” I say, and hit record again. “Tell me what you remember. You responded to the call. Where were you when it came in?”
“On Red Hill Road,” Gilcrest says, without pause. “A few miles from your place. At first, all we knew was your mother had been hurt. I found her at that house by the graveyard. She was on the kitchen floor, barely breathing. I did what I could to stabilize her until the EMTs arrived, and then I took off for the island. You can verify this in my report, but I’d say I got to the island a half hour after the call first came in. Maybe forty-five minutes.”
“You must have seen blood in the parking area,” I say.
Gilcrest shakes his head. “It was dark. No moon. I couldn’t see much. I ran through the blood and tracked it across the footbridge. It messed up the forensics later on.”
“You didn’t wait for backup?” I ask.
“Rookie mistake,” Gilcrest says. “And the kind of mistake that can get a cop killed, but no, I didn’t wait. I was much more concerned with seeing if anyone else had been hurt or killed. There was one light on in the kitchen, a pot of Bolognese burned on the stove, and your brother’s half-finished math homework on the kitchen table, but otherwise, the place was quiet. Eerily so. I almost left when I heard a baby crying.” He catches my eye. “You.”
I imagine a younger version of Gilcrest standing on the shoreline, searching the dark until he found the rowboat far off in the water, silhouetted against a starry sky.
“It took ten minutes of cajoling to get your brother to row to shore,” Gilcrest says. “Otherwise, we’d have had to send the police boat out to get you. Reid was freezing. Both of you were. I got blankets from the house, and Reid barely spoke.” He pauses. “Once he told us what had happened, the state detective started the search for your father.”
“Wendy Burrows,” I say.
“You’ve done your research.”
I take a deep breath and let the next question spill out. “What if I asked whether my father was alive?”
