“Nothing out of the ordinary,” Paul says. “Charlie was there earlier helping me fix a wall. Duncan Gilcrest came by, too. Then Reid stopped in and asked if I knew where Charlie had gone. I sent him to the trailhead.”
Seton barely touches my forearm, a warning to keep my mouth shut. “When did Gilcrest leave the farm?” she asks.
“About an hour ago,” Paul says. “Jesus, Freya. I told you not to play those shows at the Landing. We were trying to lie low here.”
“I can’t hide,” Freya says. “I should have learned that by now.”
“Thank God nothing worse happened,” Paul says.
Seton punches a text into her phone and confers with the deputy, who begins to cordon off the area with yellow crime-scene tape.“Normally I’d have to do backbends to get the state cops to focus on an incident like this one,” Seton says, “but Gilcrest is sending a couple of techs this way. And before anyone asks, Gilcrest was driving his daughter to a softball game. Now he’s on his way here.”
From the trees, the deputy shouts. Seton joins her and takes more photos, before emerging from the woods with a wad of paper towels smeared with blue. She drops the wad into a plastic bag. “Let me see your hands,” she says to Reid.
Paul gives Reid a quick nod, and Seton snaps a photo of both sides of Reid’s outstretched hands. “You, too,” she says to Paul.
Before she can ask, I hold out my hands, too.
“I need to talk to Freya,” Seton says. “The rest of you head to the farm and wait. I’ll have questions for you, too.”
“I’ll stay,” I say.
“You won’t, though,” Seton says.
“I can handle myself, Harold,” Freya says. “I’ll be at the house soon.”
Paul, Reid, and I make our way down the unpaved road toward Burkehaven Farm, the two of them walking together and talking softly, while I trail behind and replay the afternoon’s events: the conversations with Seton, Mrs. Haviland, and Paul; the grid we scratched in the dirt; the theories Freya and I put forth; Julian’s stupid move with the podcast. And that’s not even taking into account the mysteries that keep converging: the fire, my father’s reappearance, my mother’s murder, now Freya’s stalker. Four separate, unrelated incidents. Or maybe not so unrelated.
What if . . . what if . . . what if . . .
Start with the simplest explanation.
Gilcrest was at Burkehaven Farm earlier. And he worked for the security firm in New York when Freya was onEternal Flame. And he lured her here to New Hampshire, far away from her life in Manhattan. He’s touched every part of that plotline.
We arrive at the farm and enter Paul’s converted barn, an enormous kitchen built from reclaimed materials, with ceilings that soar to therafters, and a wine cellar in the old hayloft. “Gilcrest and his team should be laser focused on Andrea Haviland,” Paul says. “We don’t need him distracted with protecting his girlfriend.”
Reid raises an eyebrow. “Or maybe Gilcrest will learn something about his girlfriend he doesn’t want to know. It’s pretty convenient having a stalker return in the middle of a murder investigation, especially when the woman being stalked has been trying to revive her flagging career for decades.”
I’ve had similar thoughts, but they don’t jibe with what I observed in the moment. “Freya was terrified,” I say.
“Freya’s an actress,” Reid says. “She’ll play any role she needs to, including damsel in distress. What do you bet she’s on the phone with her agent right now trying to book a gig?”
“Freya’s beenavoidingthe reporters,” I say.
Or she mostly has.
“That makes them want to talk to her more,” Reid says. “We’ll see what the cops dig up. They might find connections they never imagined.”
“Watch it, Reid,” Paul says, resting his hands on the marble counter. “We need to stick together and keep the story tight and to the point. That’s the way you get through these things. I know both of you are upset about ... about everything. I am, too.” He catches Reid’s eye. “Let’s not go creating links where none exist. The FBI hasn’t managed to find Freya’s stalker. Why would it be different for the New Hampshire state police?”
“There are a lot fewer suspects than there were in Manhattan,” Reid says. “Plus, we have Seton Haviland on the case, and Charlie here, too. He gets off on digging into things that should be left alone. Any new sightings of Dad?”
I ignore the jab. I also haven’t forgotten Reid’s teenage bedroom, the walls covered with images of Freya he’d torn from magazines, images my mother thought made him feel safe. “What were you doing at the trailhead?” I ask.
“I was looking for you,” Reid says. “What were you thinking, releasing that podcast? You’ve done enough damage. And stay away from Vance Moodey, or anyone else I work with. Your questions are making trouble I don’t need. People are talking and calling in debts.”
Off in the distance, a police siren sounds as a thought suddenly takes shape: The simplest explanation for what happened to Freya’s truck has nothing to do with Duncan Gilcrest or a long-ago connection to a soap opera set. Instead, it’s standing right here trying to convince me Freya did this to herself. Reid owns the building where Freya lives and showed more than a passing interest in her years ago; he has access to her condo and its security system, which means he could have easily slipped into the apartment and taken that bottle of nail polish; and we found him hiding in the woods by the truck.
But the question is why. Could the answer lie in the money he owes? Reid and I do need to talk. But not here, not in front of Freya’s lawyer, and not with the police on the way. “We’ll finish this later,” I say to him.
