“The less you involve yourself, Haviland,” Gilcrest said, “the better it will be for all of us, including Charlie. The last thing he needs is rumors about a compromised investigation following him for the rest of his life. Go home, get out of those wet clothes, and be grateful you won’t be up all night with the rest of us.”
“I wish,” Seton said. “If you need Maggie, I’ll have to cover her shift. I’ll be on all night.”
After Seton left, Maggie took my sodden clothes. My phone, too, though I doubted it would work after sitting in the pocket of my jeans while I treaded water. The state police will recover the audio recordings stored safely in the cloud. Maybe something I recorded will lead them to solving this case, the only thing I care about.
Down by the dock, Hadley confers with the medical examiner while a team of state cops sets up flood lamps and fans out across the island to begin a grid search.
In the dark, someone taps on the screen door, and the hinges creak. “Mind some company?” Gilcrest asks, stepping onto the porch beforeI can respond. His boots thump across the wooden planks until he looms over me. “I’m sorry for your loss,” he adds. “Truly. But I need to ask some questions. Do you want anything before we get started? Coffee? Water?”
“I know where things are,” I say.
Gilcrest pulls up a ladder-back chair and sits beside me. “Hit the high points and we can fill in the rest tomorrow, after you’ve gotten some sleep.”
“High points? Does finding my brother’s dead body in the lake count?”
“Start with the last time you saw him alive. What time was it?”
I picture Reid tucking his hair into his swim cap and hear him telling me he loved me, despite what I’d said. “It was before dark,” I say.
“How much before dark?”
“The sun was on the horizon.”
“Okay, that’ll give us a range,” Gilcrest says. “Did you send a text? Make a call? Anything we can use to mark the time?”
“My phone got ruined in the water. And your team has it anyway.”
“We’ll see what we can recover.” Gilcrest shows me a photo on his own phone of the pitcher of martinis I brought to the dock sitting next to an evidence marker. “Was Reid drinking before he went in the water?”
“I mixed the drinks,” I say. “Reid swam every evening. Sometimes the rest of us got started with happy hour. When he finished, he’d join us.”
“Who’s ‘us’?”
“It used to be my mother,” I say, “and Hadley, when she’s in town. Paul Burke, too. But I was the only one there tonight. I was trying to get things back to normal. Reid had a sip, no more. I left and walked over to Burkehaven, where I found my aunt. There’s a recording on my phone of our conversation that should have a time stamp. The last time I saw Reid alive was five or ten minutes before that recording begins.”
“Anything on those recordings you should tell me about?”
I glance up. “Hadley and I talked about Freya, who texted to tell me she’d left for New York. I assume you already knew.”
Gilcrest’s expression falters, if only for a split second. He stands and strides toward the door as if to leave, and then turns, spinning the wooden chair around, the ladder-back creating a barrier between us. “You made a whole pitcher of martinis and brought two glasses, and then left the pitcher behind. Do you usually let your brother swim by himself?”
Behind me, someone steps onto the porch from inside the house. Hadley says, “We’ve been telling Reid not to swim alone for thirty-seven years, practically since the day he was born. He didn’t listen.”
“I shouldn’t have left,” I say.
“Do you mind if I talk to Charlie in private?” Gilcrest says to Hadley, but my aunt comes to my side and slides onto the arm of the chair.
“I’ll stay,” she says. “And Charlie, you should know Reid had a contusion on the back of his skull. The ME will do the autopsy, but my guess is he may not have drowned, and even if he did, the wound was a contributing factor.”
Blunt-force trauma, like my mother.
“Charlie,” Gilcrest says, “you were on the phone with Chief Haviland before you found the body. Does she often call you when she’s on duty? She was responding to a call to your house. And your brother was dead in the lake.”
Hadley puts a hand of warning to my arm, but I speak anyway. “Seton calledme. She asked where Reid was.”
“And what happened next?” Gilcrest asks.
“My father killed Reid,” I say as Hadley’s fingernails dig into my skin. “He was here.”
