“Don’t worry,” I say. “I’m not great on follow-through.”
“It’s one of the things I like best about you.” Seton kicks at the Volvo’s front tire. “Are you coming to the café tonight?”
“I thought you were banned from the café.”
“I don’t listen to my mom.”
“And that’s one of the things I like best aboutyou,” I say. “But I won’t be able to get there till tomorrow. We’re opening the camp today. And there’s the Lantern Festival.”
Tonight, as on every Memorial Day weekend, paper lanterns will float over the lake—like they did twenty-five years ago.
“You lake people and your traditions,” Seton says. “The Lantern Festival is a fire hazard. I should sic my mom on you and get it banned. Payback for your stupid podcast.” A voice crackles over her radio, something about an incident at Burkehaven. “Speaking of my mom.” Seton takes a deep, centering breath, one that she exhales for a full five-count. “I have to take care of another mess she’s in the middle of.Youstay out of it. Understand? And drop the podcast. It’s a terrible idea. Like, the worst idea I’ve ever heard in my entire life.”
She jogs to the cruiser and speeds past me toward town. When the sound of the siren fades, I start the recording again. As Julian told me earlier, if people don’t get angry, there’s no story to tell. And I have no intention of dropping the podcast, for Seton or anyone else.
“We all know what happened, Charlie,” I say. “That’s what Seton Haviland said to me. She doesn’t want me to dig into the past. Her father died. My father killed him. We’ve carried the weight of that burden through our whole lives, of what happened, of what was taken, and what could have been.”
I pause as another car passes, waiting until the sound of the engine has faded in the distance.
“Here’s more of what I know,” I say. “Seton’s father, Isaac Haviland, hired Reid Construction to rehab an old train depot in town. My mother, Jane Reid, and Mr. Haviland began working closely together,which led to an affair. When Mr. Haviland showed up at Idlewood, he intended to convince my mother to leave with him.”
I pause. The rest of the story is hard to say out loud.
“My father stabbed Isaac first, then my mom, then turned on my brother Reid and me, but Reid escaped with me in a rickety old rowboat. He pulled on the oars until we were a hundred yards from shore, drifting on the inky water, while paper lanterns floated overhead. It was early in the season. The docks hadn’t yet gone in, and the other boats were in storage. That didn’t keep my father from wading into the water and begging Reid to return to shore. Reid rowed farther into the lake to keep us safe, and my father eventually fled the scene.
“Hours later, a local cop found the two of us huddled on that boat. A massive manhunt began, with Wendy Burrows leading the investigation, and the next day, this yellow Volvo, the one I’m driving right now, was found at a trailhead in the White Mountains as a freak spring snowstorm hit the region and stranded hikers all over the range. Resources were diverted to search and rescue, and by the time the hunt for my father resumed, the trail had grown cold. The police claim my father died on that mountain, though his body was never found.”
I tap my finger on the steering wheel.
“Isaac Haviland’s murdered. My father disappears. The lead investigator drowns.”
We all know what happened, Charlie.
We do know. Or we should know. My father died in those mountains. He must have. He was an accountant who wore glasses and sang in regional theater, not a mountain man, so if he didn’t die, he should have been caught by now.
“But without a body,” I say, “you can never truly know if someone’s gone.”
Chapter Four
The town of Hero spills over the foothills and clings to the lakeshore. Eagle’s Nest Landing, the café Isaac Haviland built all those years ago—the one Seton’s mother, Andrea Haviland, owns now—sits in an old train depot at the end of a long-defunct rail line. Out in the marina, piers have begun to fill with boats coming out of dry dock for the season. Quaint shops, a nineteenth-century hotel, a summer stock theater, and a grid of antique homes, one of which Seton’s mother lives in, form the core of the town. On the southern side of the marina, brand-new condos rise from where a crumbling motel once sat, part of my brother Reid’s plan to transform Hero and bring in more summer residents.
Beyond town, the street narrows as it curves through densely packed summer cabins dotting the shore. After a few miles, the houses grow sparse and then disappear as the road swerves away from the lake and past a cemetery with two dozen weatherworn headstones. A blue bungalow, my mother’s winter home, sits at a T in the road.
I pull alongside a well-tended perennial garden, where my aunt Hadley’s head of short dark hair bobs among daisies begging to bud. She holds up a hand to block the sun. “You’re here,” she says, her voice soft and girlish.
“Up for the weekend,” I say. “Then it’s back to the grind.”
“At the radio station?”
“As long as they’ll have me.”
“I fly to Cairo Tuesday morning,” Hadley says. “Maybe I can hitch a ride with you to the airport.”
Hadley volunteers around the world as a trauma surgeon. When she’s in Hero, she takes shifts at the Kingston Hospital ER on the other side of the lake. She’s in her mid-fifties, her short hair cut more for practicality than fashion. Even when she’s not at work, she usually wears scrubs, like this set, which is covered with what appear to be hand puppets.
“I’ll be here most weekends this summer,” I say. “I wish you were staying longer.”
“I’m your favorite aunt.”
