Pam must have been something of a sleuth herself. She’d taken it upon herself—it was hermoral obligation, she’d explained to Regina—to approach the window of what would have been the master bedroom. The blinds had been drawn, but the sounds emanating from the room made it plain what was going on in there.
She did not add—but Regina and I understood this part without anyone needing to point it out—that the sound of Forrest Emerson having sex (Forrest Emerson making love, if you wanted to get sentimental about it) was all too familiar to Pam Oliver. She only had to go back a year in her memory bank to remember that sound from when she’d been the one to inspire his expressions of joy. This part had not featured in her report to Regina.
On the call, evidently Pam had explained that at first she’d kept the information concerning Forrest’s visit to the Barnetts’ place to herself. “I didn’t want to upset you,” she’d told Regina. “But this morning, I saw his car over there again, and I decided that if it were me, I’d want to know.
“Of course it’s up to you what you choose to do with this information,” Pam had added. “It’s none of my business.”
This was supposed to be a golf day—the men’s final round of the summer. Forrest had hoisted his clubs into the back of his sports car, letting Regina know that the boys at the club were counting on him to fill out their foursome again. She should not expect him home until late afternoon. They’d be golfing the full eighteen holes.
“I wish I could just stay home with you and the kids,” he’d told her, stroking her face. “I want to put the finishing touches on my plans for the fireworks. Then I’ve got the outrigger to attach to your grandpa’s old canoe.”
The birchbark one. Too tippy to use without modifications.
As he headed to his car, Forrest turned around one more time with a wave in Regina’s direction. “Love you, babe,” he called out.
All of this had taken place less than two minutes earlier. Now—her conversation with Pam having concluded—Regina stood at the counter, still gripping the phone and gnawing on her celery. Her face, which had been twisted in rage moments before, took on an odd appearance now. Not glee, certainly, but not despair either. I might call it the look of anticipation an animal gets right before sinking its teeth into a piece of meat.
“Go get your bike,” she said to me. She was not a woman to waste her breath on niceties. “Get yourself over to Brenda’s house.”
71
Breakup
Pam Oliver wasn’t wrong about the location of Forrest’s Porsche. He’d parked it out behind the barn where the Department of Public Works stored their snow-removal equipment. Beside the plows sat a Zamboni donated by a wealthy hockey lover, put into service every winter to clear a patch of ice on the lake for the annual Valentine’s Day festival that featured a fundraising hockey game and an ice fishing derby for the townspeople—the year-rounders. In summer, nobody paid much attention to the Public Works barn. It was the perfect spot for a person to leave his car if he didn’t want anyone to notice.
Always thorough in her planning, Regina had reminded me before I set out on my latest reconnaissance mission to watch for poison ivy, which grew like crazy on that side of the lake. In typical Regina fashion—as the woman who thought of everything—she had presented me with a bottle of Tecnu to slather over my ankles and shins, along with a pair of heavy socks and rubber boots to protect myself. These made the bike ride over to the Public Works barn a little more challenging, but by this point in the summer, I’d been putting in plenty of time biking up hills—not to mention chasing tennis balls.
I hid Buttercup in some bushes. Then I hiked over to the Barnetts’ place—a far more modest house than the Emersons’, with only a verysmall strip of water access, which was also overgrown with reeds and some form of algae that had definitely not spread to Wonderland.
Bending low, I made my way to the back of the house, as instructed. My plan had been to stake out the area closest to the bedroom—for the purpose of recording additional data confirming the sexual nature of Forrest and Brenda’s relationship. But as I got closer, I saw that the two of them were standing on the lawn. The way they faced each other, I knew, even before I heard their voices, that this was not another one of their romantic rendezvous.
“I keep calling,” she said. “Why don’t you answer my messages?”
“It’s not fair that I’ve been avoiding you,” Forrest was saying to her. “I’ve been a coward. I should have said this to your face before now.”
“I know it’s hard for you,” she said, reaching to touch his face. “I’ve been trying to be patient.”
He took a step back.
“You got the wrong idea about me, Brenda,” Forrest was saying to her. “We had a great time together for a while there. But I never intended to leave my wife. If I gave you the opposite impression, I owe you an apology.”
“What about all those things you told me?” she said. “The part about how you woke up thinking about me. You couldn’t bear a day apart.”
“Those are the kind of things a person says when they’re carried away,” he said. “I wasn’t expecting you to take it all so seriously.”
A look came over her face. How had I ever imagined Brenda was pretty? All of a sudden she looked hideous.
“What are you talking about?”
“It’s over, Brenda. It’s been over since that day on the island. I just didn’t know how to tell you.”
“You ... you ... you ...” Her voice was shrill. Her hands were flailing, coming at him like little birds. Or a flock of bats. “I was going to leave my husband. We were going to have this great life together.”
“You’re an attractive woman,” he told her. “We had a lot of fun together.” Young as I was, I knew he was not helping his case. Nothing Forrest tried saying was making her any less mad.
“Attractive?Attractive?” She was practically spitting.
“Any man would be crazy not to want you. Your husband’s a lucky man.”
