“She insists she hasn’t seen him since he disappeared.”
“Plus, there’s the recording showing her arriving at the sceneafterthe fire started. No opportunity.”
I tell Freya Paul’s theory that Mrs. Haviland left the single camera in place on purpose so she could start the fire and be recorded arriving on scene.
“That’s a lot of detail to keep track of,” Freya says, adding Mrs. Haviland’s name to the grid. “For it to work, we’d have to shoot a flashback, maybe in black and white. The explanation’s too convoluted otherwise.”
“God forbid we shoot a flashback,” I mumble, though it gives me an idea. I pull up the audio files on my phone. “I have my own flashback right here. My mother and I talked the night before ... the night before everything happened.”
I hit play as my mother’s voice washes over me:Good marriages don’t end. And bad marriages don’t have a good guy and a bad guy. We all play our parts. I played mine, and so did your father.
I hit pause.
“Doesn’t that sound as if my father had an affair, too?” I ask. “Mrs. Haviland denied it was her. I don’t know who to believe anymore, and Seton—”
I add Seton’s initials to the grid, and this time it really does feel like a betrayal. “She’s been against the podcast since the moment I told her about it.”
“She doesn’t want to dig up the past,” Freya says.
“Or she’s protecting someone,” I say. “Seton and Mrs. Haviland tell each other everything. Could Seton know something the rest of us don’t?” I shiver. “What if Seton is my half sister?”
“That’s a little too soap opera, even for me,” Freya says. “And if it were true, my guess is your mothers would have kept you very,veryfar away from each other. Let me hear that recording again.”
I hit play.
“Your mother’s saying that both your parents did things they shouldn’t have, but she doesn’t say your father had anaffair. He could have been a drug addict or a drunk or worse.”
I draw a line connecting Mrs. Haviland’s name to my father’s. “Or maybe the simplest explanation is he slept with an old friend.”
Freya’s eyes crease in thought as she calls to Ginger. The dog barrels from the trees and sits at attention. Freya attaches the line to her collar, loads the rifle, and shoots. “When Hadley and I were out on the boat this morning, I got to thinking about firsts and lasts. Sometimes you know they’re happening, and sometimes you don’t see them until they’re far off in the rearview mirror. Like that night we met at the Landing. That was a first for us. When we talked on the sidewalk in the rain, I never would have guessed we’d be here together in the woods two weeks later.”
Freya breaks open the rifle again, loads the chamber, and fires. This time, she misses the target.
“You’re shaking,” I say.
She pops out the spent casing. “I had a memory come back to me right this very moment, fully formed, something I haven’t thought about in decades. The last time my family stayed at Burkehaven was the year before I started college. I don’t think any of us knew we wouldn’t return, or that we’d lose touch with so many of the people we’d spent summers with. Hadley and I were good friends. And even though we only saw each other for two weeks each summer, I knew she’d be part of my time here. We couldn’t have known the last time we spoke to each other would bethelast time, that I’d blink and decades would melt away.”
Freya lays the rifle on the stone wall.
“I took the path to Idlewood on our last day,” she continues. “Hadley and I went swimming. It was hot, and the sun was beating down on us, and the water felt silky against my skin, and it was one of those days that should never have ended. Hadley’s a year older than I am, so she’d been out to California already for her first year of college. For as long as I’d known her, she’d talked about leaving New Hampshire. She wanted to travel the world, and by then I knew I wanted to live in New York, to be an artist. She’d instilled a desire for independence in me.”
“You both got what you wanted,” I say.
“That’s just it,” Freya says. “I’m glad she got what she wanted. It was a relief to learn that, actually, because that last time I spoke to your aunt, her whole outlook had changed. As we floated in the lake, she was smiling and laughing in a way I hadn’t seen before. She told me she was considering staying in Hero and transferring to Kingston State.” Freya’s eyes suddenly focus. “It’s a snapshot in time, a single moment Hadley probably doesn’t remember.”
“Hadley didn’t transfer to Kingston State,” I say. “She went to Berkeley and finished med school at UCSF. I can’t imagine her staying in Hero. She makes fun of it the whole time she’s here.”
“But she had a boyfriend that summer,” Freya says. “Or a boy she was obsessed with talking about.” She crosses over to the grid and adds Hadley’s name beneath Andrea Haviland’s. Then she draws a line connecting Hadley to my father. “Her boyfriend was Mark Kilgore. Your father.”
Chapter Thirty-One
I scuff Hadley’s name from the grid of suspects with the toe of my shoe. While I’m at it, I erase Seton’s name, too. “Hadley couldn’t have dated my father,” I say. “He was too old. He’d never have dated a kid like her.”
“Stay objective, Harold,” Freya says. “And stick to the facts. You don’t know your father or what he’d do, but if I remember correctly, your father was a junior at Kingston State that year, two years older than Hadley, who’d just finished her freshman year at Berkeley. If I was eighteen, she was nineteen, and he’d have been twenty-one. Seems okay to me.”
She’s right, of course. My mother was four years older than her sister, and my father was right between them.
“If you talked to your father at the Landing,” Freya says, “he’s either managed to live on the lam on his own, or someone’s been helping him. Maybe it’s Hadley: the sad sister with the long, unrequited crush on her brother-in-law. He gets himself in trouble and needs help. Maybe he knew she had feelings for him and exploited them to manipulate her.”
