She almost laughs. “Nice to meet you, sir,” she says, adding a nod to a firm handshake, then releasing Ginger from the line. “Go play,” she says to the dog, who dashes into the woods after a squirrel.
“I saw your boyfriend,” I say. “He came to the farm to talk to Paul.”
I tell her about my conversation with Andrea Haviland earlier this morning and that I made up with Seton while out in the helicopter.
“That was you flying over Hadley and me when we were on the lake,” Freya says.
“Did you learn anything from her?”
“Not really. We had forty years of catching up to do.”
I lift one of the guns and find an aluminum can in the sight. The weapon still feels dangerous pressed into my shoulder, even with an empty chamber. “It’s as though I’m watching myself move through my own story while I gather pieces and try to fit them together. And I’m not sure what the pieces are right now, because nothing seems to make sense.”
“Stay here,” Freya says, disappearing into the trees and returning with a long stick she uses to scratch a grid in the muddy ground. “OnScene of the Crime, Gina Shock would gather the CBI team at a whiteboard after the mid-episode break, especially if the story was complex. We’d bat around ideas, but it was also a way to refresh the audience on who the suspects were. So, who are our suspects?”
Only everyone I know. And it feels coldhearted to reduce my mother’s murder to a grid, but I also want to learn what happened. “Start with me,” I say. “Gilcrest did.”
Freya scratchesHaroldinto the grid. “Motive?” she asks.
I walk her through my theory that my mother planned to put Idlewood into conservation.
“Getting cut out of a big inheritance, not bad.” Freya adds an X to the Motive column. “Means: a tree limb; opportunity: you were at the scene.”
“But I didn’t do it,” I say.
Freya x-es out my name.
“You’ll take my word for it?” I ask.
“Gina wouldn’t, but I will. And eliminating suspects is as helpful as identifying them. Your brother has the exact same motive as you: money. But not necessarily the same means or opportunity.”
She adds Reid’s name to the grid, but seeing my brother as part of a list of suspects makes me uncomfortable, especially when the list—so far—only consists of one other person.
“It was probably a stranger,” I say.
“Maybe,” Freya says, placing a question mark at the bottom of the grid. “But not very satisfying, story wise. A random act of violencewould never make it out of the writers’ room. What about our friend Vance Moodey at the lumberyard, with his handy two-by-fours? Motive could be greed, jealousy, envy, rage. He could be a serial killer. We only have his word he was dating your mother, and even if they were dating, maybe she met him at Burkehaven to break things off and he lost his temper.”
“Gilcrest told me he went to see Vance this morning,” I say.
Freya pauses. “Yeah, Duncan’s a real cop, so if I have a theory about a crime, I have to tell him, whether he’s earned it or not.”
Duly noted.
I take the stick from her and scratch Vance’s name beneath mine. “And my father,” I say, adding his name, too.
Freya clucks her tongue. “Viewers love stories where the past comes around and connects to the present. This could be as easy as discovery. Maybe your mother found out your father was alive and threatened to expose him. Your father could have killed your mother, started the fire, and retreated into the trees when he saw Andrea Haviland approaching in the boat. Then, when you arrived, he could have attacked you with the tree limb.” Freya adds three check marks next to my father’s initials. “Motive, means, and opportunity equals a viable suspect.”
She’s getting a little too into this. “We’re not in the writers’ room,” I say.
“Sorry,” Freya says, touching my arm as she seems to search for something to say. “How are you feeling, anyway?”
Tired of talking about how I feel. “Let’s keep going,” I say. “But honestly, focusing on the crime helps me forget about the rest of it. I know it doesn’t make sense, but at least I’m doing something.”
“Back to your father, then,” Freya says. “On the show, we’d work your father into the plot early in the episode, but we’d put him aside as a long-shot theory. One of the junior agents would pursue it, while Gina Shock followed other leads. Your father would come back in the last act, when he’d become the main focus of the investigation.”
“Since this isn’t a TV show,” I say, “maybe we should keep him in our sights.”
“Or,” Freya says, “maybe there’s another storyline we’re forgetting, one your dad’s distracting us from, andthatstoryline will come around and connect. What did Andrea Haviland have to say about your father?”
