I try reading her expression to determine whether she’s holding back, but her face doesn’t reveal much. “Not once,” I say, “in the years he’s been gone?”
“I wish I had, but no, Mark hasn’t been sneaking in and out of my life for a quarter century.”
“What would you do if he showed up right now?”
“I’d call my daughter and let her do her job.” Mrs. Haviland breaks the edge off one of the cookies and eats it slowly. “Let’s pretend you actually saw Mark that night. What could have brought a man who’s been in hiding to the very town he fled all those years ago? Maybe he was worried about his son, Charlie. You were in the hospital that day, too. And maybe when he saw you at the bar, once he got to talk to you, he felt okay leaving.”
“How would he have known about the fire?” I ask.
“He could have heard about it on the local news. Both of our names were made public.”
I’m slightly annoyed that Mrs. Haviland came up with this idea so easily, one I should have thought of on my own. But the concept of my father seeking me out—worrying about me—isn’t something I could have contemplated until recently. For years, my only impressions of Mark Kilgore have been of rage and anger. Now a person has begun to emerge and replace those emotions, and enough doubt has been raised about what happened that I could almost buy into Mrs. Haviland’s theory. “As he was leaving that night,” I say, “he told me I was all he could think about.”
“Sounds like I may be right, then,” Mrs. Haviland says. “What else have you got? Ask, and I’ll tell you what I can.”
“My mother called you the night before the fire. You talked for more than two minutes.”
“It was after midnight, and she wanted to meet at Burkehaven in the morning.”
“Did she mention a project in Finstock?”
“We didn’t talk business. She said she had something important to tell me but wouldn’t say what.”
“You and Jane—”
“We hated each other?”
“You said it, not me.”
“Time mellows grudges. Jane and I knew each other long before she had the affair with my husband. We’ve managed to coexist in this tiny community. We could have been friends again if the circumstances were right.”
I like Mrs. Haviland. She’s been kind to me when she hasn’t had to be, but she also had a long-standing grudge against my mother, one I doubt had mellowed as much as she wants me to believe, so I remind myself to remain impartial, to take in the facts without allowing my feelings to influence my judgment.
“What happened that spring before Mr. Haviland was killed?” I ask. “How did you find out about the affair?”
Mrs. Haviland takes a moment to collect her thoughts. “That’s the part I try not to think about,” she says. “Mark, your father, found out about the affair first. One of the foremen on a project had seen Jane and Isaac at a hotel bar in Concord, and they hadn’t left much to the imagination. Mark confronted your mother and then came to see me, and ...” She pauses and shrugs. “I didn’t believe him. Or maybe I didn’t want to hear what he had to say because it would have forced me to make too many choices. I had a new baby and no job and no idea what I’d do if what Mark had said was true. I’d gotten myself into a spot where I was completely dependent on Isaac financially, so I told your father I never wanted to see him again. When Isaac came home that night, I let him into the house, and we acted as if none of it had happened, even though Jane had to have told him that Mark had confronted her.” Mrs. Haviland sighs. “Talk about compartmentalization. The day Isaac was murdered, he tried to convince me to go to Idlewood for the Lantern Festival. I almost said yes.”
She rests her forehead on her palm as she sits with the memories, working through her own scenarios for what could have happened had she made different decisions, I imagine. Eventually, she says, “I don’t blame myself for what happened. Or, I mostly don’t. But what if I’d swallowed my pride and gone to the party? Maybe we wouldn’t be where we are now.”
“Paul said almost the same thing to me,” I say.
Mrs. Haviland sits up. “What does Paul know? He thinks he’s better than the rest of us, and has for as long as I’ve known him. I don’t owe him a thing.”
Something Seton mentioned in the boat two weeks ago flashes into my mind. “But you did owe Paul at one point,” I say. “He got you out of a bind. He lent you money for the Landing.”
“Paul lentIsaacmoney, not me. Isaac convinced Paul to invest the fifty grand he needed to finish the rehab on the Landing. The two of them tried to keep it secret from me.”
“Isaac showed up in New York, too,” I say. “He asked Freya to invest in the restaurant.”
“Isaac probably asked anyone who gave him the time of day for money. Once my husband got an idea in his head, good or bad, he went with it. But imagine this: What if Paulhadn’tgiven Isaac the money? Isaac and Jane wouldn’t have had a reason to work together all spring, or to do anything together, for that matter, and none of us would be in this mess. But I paid Paul back as soon as I figured out what had happened. He was the last person in the world I wanted holding a favor over my head.”
“Fifty thousand dollars is a lot,” I say. “Why would Paul loan that much money in the first place?”
Mrs. Haviland taps the table beside my phone. “I’ll help you spin a tale for the podcast. Maybe Paul had a secret and he’s the one who killed Isaac. If you could prove that, you’d make my day.”
I scowl at her. “If Paul killed your husband, then my mother and Reid covered for him for decades. Why would they do that?”
“They wouldn’t. That’s my point.” Mrs. Haviland rests a hand over mine. “You lost your father. And now you’ve lost your mother, too, and you’re trying to make sense of things that don’t make sense, and it’s terrible in every possible way. I get it, more than you realize. For decades, I’ve been trying to understand why my whole life zigged when I wish it had zagged. On the night Isaac was killed, Seton was ten months old, and I was home, stewing because she was screaming her head off, and I didn’t have two nickels to rub together and felt trapped in a marriage I wanted to end. The only way I could get her to sleep was to put her in the car, so I drove to Sunapee on the other side of the state, bought a soft-serve cone at the Anchorage, and parked by the lake there. In the space of a week, I’d lost two of my best friends and been betrayed by my husband. I’d never felt so tired or lonely or hopeless in my life. I fell asleep, and it must have been midnight when I woke. It took me an hour to drive home to Hero, and when I got to the house, the police were already there.” She pauses, collecting herself. “And nothing’s beenthe same since. I’d give anything to see Isaac again. Mark, too. For your sake, I hope your fatherwashere the other night.”
