“I shouldn’t have come back to Idlewood to talk to you by the fire that night,” Paul says. “But I wanted to stay close, to see what you’d learned, what you’d pieced together. Jane called me when I got home. I assumed she was upset about your podcast, about telling her story to the world. She told me we needed to talk, and that it couldn’t wait until morning.”
“You met her at Burkehaven,” I say.
“In the middle of the night,” Paul says.
“And what about Reid? Was he there?”
Paul takes a moment to answer, weighing what to tell me and what to hold back as a negotiating tool later, I imagine. So I load the rifle, shoot the post beside him, and reload again.
“I was alone,” Paul says, shielding his face. “Reid wouldn’t have hurt Jane. He loved her too much. But Jane told me she was going to the police.I was the one who found Reid,she said to me.He was hunched over Isaac’s body, knife in hand. My son, transformed into someone I didn’t recognize.Cut out the evil,he kept saying. Cut out the evil before it takes root.”
I envision my mother facing off with Paul under the cover of darkness. “Reid’s words have haunted me for decades,” I imagine her saying. “Tell me, Paul, why would Charlie, my son who was an infant, my son who only knows what’s been told to him about that awful night, why would he utter the exact same phrase twenty-five years later? The only two people on earth who should know what Reid said when he killed Isaac are Reid and me. We were the only ones there.”
I wonder if Paul tried to deny what he’d done, or to rationalize, or if he simply admitted his crimes.
“Jane tried to run,” Paul says, “but I smashed her head in with a two-by-four. I moved her car from Idlewood and left it in the trees a mile away. By the time I made it back to Burkehaven, the sun was up. Reid had filled the tanks for the backhoe, so there was plenty of gasoline to start the fire. Once the flames got going, I saw Andrea approaching in her boat. She’s lucky you showed up when you did. Five minutes later and she’d have been dead, too.”
“You attacked me,” I say.
“I didn’t have a choice,” Paul says.
Footsteps sound in the woods behind me. Seconds later, Seton emerges from the trees, her firearm raised.
“You landed that thing,” I say.
She inches closer. “Drop the rifle, Charlie.”
I peer through the scope.
“He destroyed my family,” I say.
He destroyed them—us—in every way, by manipulating Reid, by forcing my mother’s hand, by making us live with the cruelty of the unspoken. I spent my life feeling as if I didn’t know anyone in my family, and now I never will.
“Everything ...” Paul begins. “Everything got out of hand. I’m sorry, Charlie. I’m so, so sorry.”
“Tell Seton what you did,” I say.
“I killed Jane and burned down the house,” Paul says. “I drowned Reid, too. He knew I’d killed your mother and threatened to come clean about what he’d done, about what I’d been doing to Freya. I killed them both.”
I doubt a coerced confession will matter much, let alone hold up in court, but it’s what I needed to hear. There are other pieces to the story, though, and once we’re off this mountain, Paul will remember how lawyers evade answers. “The detective?” I ask. “Wendy Burrows?”
“What does it matter?” Paul asks.
I pull back the hammer to release the safety.
“Don’t, Charlie,” Seton says, edging toward me.
“Wendy got close to solving the case,” Paul says, quickly. “But she was a drunk. I found her passed out behind the wheel over on Foss Hill with an empty fifth of vodka on the seat next to her. She went there after most of her shifts. I put the car in neutral and let it roll off the ledge and into the lake.”
“And my father?” I say. “You knew he was alive all this time?”
“Not until tonight,” Paul says. “Your father found me at the farmhouse, after Reid died. I hadn’t had a chance to change out of my wet clothes. As soon as Mark saw me, he knew what I’d done.”
I feel the cold steel of the trigger against my finger and picture my father in that photo I have hidden in the thesaurus, at the beginning of a long line of choices and an unimaginable future. Shooting Paul would be so easy. I could call it self-defense, and maybe Seton would back up my story. But then that imaginary wall between us would turn to solid brick, and we’d never manage to get through it. And I’d spend the rest of my life knowing what I’d done, living with another secret, this one of my own making.
“Put the rifle down, Charlie,” Seton says.
I can’t give Paul any more power. I let the rifle clatter to the ground and hold my hands in the air. “For you, Seton,” I say, “anything.”
