HABIT: a gripping detective thriller full of suspense

by T. J. Brearton

  “Not that I know of, sir. Why?”

  “Well, I’ve met Kevin, actually. He made a comment about how he was ‘the last in a line of token children.’”

  Kettering sat back again, giving this consideration. “I see. Well, again. Different strokes. You know, some of these wealthy types, they don’t have children always out of love. It may be, what’s the word?”

  “Perfunctory.”

  “That’s it. To have an heir, to pass on the family business.”

  “And what is their business?”

  “That I couldn’t quite tell you,” said Kettering. “It’s all Greek to me once it gets up into the mega millions. After that, it just seems that money makes money. I think he’s in medicine, though.”

  “Alexander Heilshorn.”

  “Yuh.”

  “So it might be new money. Some sort of patent, or investment. Maybe a company that has done very well.”

  Kettering scowled with thought. “Rebecca said something once about her father having his finger on the pulse when it came to biotechnology. A technocrat, she may have said. But, even though we were fond of each other, there was this air of . . . what do I want to say? They were just private about it. I didn’t ask.”

  “And you never married Rebecca.”

  Kettering came to a full stop this time. He stopped moving, his face stopped emoting. He seemed to look across the desk at Brendan like he was an auditor. “No,” he said.

  “Can I ask why?”

  “You can, but I don’t know that I can tell you that, either. It wasn’t for lack of trying, I can tell you that.”

  “So you proposed.”

  “Not in so many words, but yes. We talked about marriage. I brought it up. She’s . . . Rebecca is several years younger than me. I’ll be fifty in December. So, there’s that.” He seemed to grow uncomfortable.

  Brendan decided to push a little further. “Was she afraid her parents wouldn’t approve?”

  It took him a moment, and Kettering found the words. “Rebecca was very independent. I know that’s, ah, maybe incongruous with how it looks, her buying a place with her parents’ money and living there, but she didn’t do anything she didn’t want to. And she did do the things she wanted to do. You see what I’m saying?”

  “Yes. You’re being very helpful, Mr. Kettering, and I appreciate it.”

  He seemed to soften a little, to revert back to the glad-handing salesman. “Feel free to call me Donald.”

  “Thanks, Donald. Just a few more things I’d like to ask and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

  “It’s no trouble.” A cloud seemed to pass over him. “Jesus, this is just terrible. How did she die?”

  Brendan was careful. He had told Kettering on the phone that Rebecca Heilshorn’s death was unnatural, but had left it there. “She was viciously assaulted and murdered,” he said now.

  Donald Kettering put a hand over his mouth. Through his fingers he said, “As in . . . beat up? Shot?”

  “I’m sorry I can’t say just how. But to call it foul play would be an understatement.”

  “Terrible. Oh my God.” Kettering took his hand away and looked out the window over the couch.

  “It is. And I’m sorry for your loss. When did you last see Rebecca?”

  His gaze lingered on the parking lot outside. His voice was distant. “Oh, well, has to have been a year.” Now his eyes came back and focused on Brendan. “Yes, about a year.”

  “No phone calls during that time? Emails, anything?”

  He shrugged his shoulders. “No. When Rebecca broke something off, she broke it off.”

  “So, if I may, you dated for about two years. But then you became . . . more serious?”

  He nodded. His face seemed to contort with a painful memory and he looked down at his desk. Brendan leaned forward a little. “What is it?”

  Kettering shook his head. He seemed to snap out of something. “It’s just. I just can’t believe this.”

  “Did you live together?”

  “No. She wanted her space.”

  “But you were exclusive.”

  His eyes came up. They had a haunted look. “I hope so, Detective.”

  “And this went on for how long?”

  “Just about a year.”

  “How about friends? Did the two of you go out to dinner, double-date? Who did Rebecca know in the area?”

  “Nada. Zip,” said Kettering. “We never did anything, despite my trying. We went to the mall once to buy some things for the house. I mean, we would go to dinner every once in a while if I pried her, but she was always looking around like she didn’t want to be seen. She never talked about any friends.”

  “Really? Not even an acquaintance? Someone that knew her at the local bakery, let’s say? Anything. You see, the details are critical to this investigation. Where she may have been the night before the tragedy is very important. Who she might have been with. I hate to ask this again, but you’re sure you were exclusive? She didn’t see other people?”

  “No. She was. Ah, I don’t want to sound cruel here. She was frigid.”

  “You two never . . .”

  “Oh we did. We did. But, you know.”

  “I understand. And there’s no one, not a single name you can think of, someone she may have talked to, even just once or twice?”

  Kettering looked like he was probing his memory. His grimaced and said, “There was a vegetable stand we stopped at a couple of times. She thought the woman who worked there was nice. A little blue hair.” He held up his hands. “That’s it.”

  Brendan nodded. “Okay. If you think of anyone, anyone or anything else at all, you’ll please call me, alright?”

  “Alright.”

  “Okay,” said Brendan. “Almost finished.”

  Kettering said nothing. The armor of his convivial nature, it appeared, had been penetrated.

  “What about Rebecca’s child?”

  Light came back into the man’s eyes again. Brendan saw a few things Donald Kettering seemed to countenance at once: protectiveness, love, pain, and vulnerability.

  Like a parent, thought Brendan.

  “Leah,” said Kettering, pronouncing it lay-uh.

  “Leah? That’s the girl’s name? Is she yours, Donald?”

  A tear slipped out of the corner of the man’s eye, which he wiped away with a knuckle. “No,” he said. “She’s not.”

  Brendan’s voice was soft. The room was very quiet. “So she was Rebecca’s child with another man. When did you first meet her?”

  “Not until Rebecca finally moved in. She brought Leah up only a few times. Once was . . . I guess two years ago. I convinced her to go to the mall with me in Rome. They have a, uh, you know, a studio there.” He frowned. “I know it’s old hat, getting pictures done in a mall – everyone just snaps cell phone pictures today. But I wanted to. It was our anniversary.”

  “I understand,” said Brendan. “That was a nice idea.” He shifted a little in his seat.

  Kettering looked positively broken. He hunched forward, staring down at his desk.

  “Did you ever meet Leah’s father?”

  Kettering’s head came up, and something flashed in his dark eyes. “No,” he said. “And she never wanted to talk about him. Rebecca just . . .” Now he pushed back from the desk, the chair pealing out another rusty squawk, and turned his head to the side and put a hand to his mouth. He was a man showing frustration; it was an outlet, perhaps, from grief. Like putting on a happy face might be.

  “She was just . . . she just did as she pleased, like I said. If she didn’t want to do it, she didn’t do it. Didn’t want to get married, didn’t want to move in. Leah mostly stayed away from the area. And I would say, ‘Just come up here full time. I have enough money, you don’t need anything. We can make a home for Leah. We can make a life.’” He reached out his hands then, as if seeking to embrace that phantom life, and then dropped them on his lap and blew air out of his lips. “But I guess little Boonvi
lle, little hick-ville, wasn’t it for her. I don’t know what was it for that girl. It wasn’t me, I know that. It wasn’t this. But she was after . . . something.”

  He turned, finally, and looked at Brendan, and his mien evoked a kind of man-to-man attitude now. “I don’t even live in Boonville. I have a beautiful place in Alder Creek. Right on Kayuta Lake. Just beautiful. Perfect place for a kid to grow up. Just . . . you know.”

  “I know,” said Brendan consolingly. “Can you give me the name of Leah’s father?”

  “Eddie,” Donald said. “That’s all I know.”

  “Thank you. Last question, Donald. Can someone, maybe one of your employees, place you here between seven and nine this morning?”

  Kettering stopped and inhaled through his nostrils. He folded his hands together for a moment, and seemed to be getting a hold of himself. “Of course. You can talk to Jason Pert, right out at the counter. He comes in at eight, after I open the shop at seven-thirty. Or Community Bank, just down the street, where I was right at nine. Or, if you need something earlier, I stopped at a little place in Forestport for coffee and a breakfast sandwich at seven this morning.”

  Brendan was nodding. “Thank you. That’s more than enough. I’ll just have a word with Mr. Pert on the way out and that will be it.”

  Brendan picked up the recorder, shut it off, and stood. Kettering stood, too. They shook hands again across the desk. “I can show myself out,” Brendan said. “Thank you so much for your time. You’ve been immensely helpful.”

  Kettering, for once, didn’t seem to have anything to say. He just nodded.

  CHAPTER NINE / THURSDAY, 4:08 PM

  He was a few minutes late arriving at Olivia Jane’s house, just outside of Barneveld. She lived in a Cape Cod-style house with a columned, wrap-around porch. The home was on Trenton Falls Road and sat across from a river that burbled softly in the afternoon. Brendan stepped out of the air conditioned Camry, the atmosphere was hazy and humid, the heat cloying, like a thick blanket. With any luck it would start to burn off in the next hour. The radio claimed the temperature had hit 95 in Utica.

  He had parked in the driveway behind her pea-green Aztec, and now walked up the short path to the front door. She must have heard his approach, because the door swung open before he reached the bottom of the steps to the porch.

  “Hi,” she said. She had traded in her blue jeans for a pair of brown shorts, and her white blouse for a red tank top. Her brown hair was tied back showing her forehead dewy with perspiration. A smudge of dirt was on her jawline. “Come on in. I’m just pulling some more vegetables.”

  Brendan smiled and walked into the house, which was cooler than the outside, but not by much. The place was roomy. An open area just inside the doors turned right into a dining area and kitchen, left into a living room with two couches facing each other and a baby grand piano in the far corner. Straight ahead were mahogany stairs that went up to the second floor.

  Olivia walked past the small dining table and through the kitchen and into a back mudroom, Brendan close behind. “Come outside if you wouldn’t mind,” she said, and headed out a back door and into a vibrant garden.

  There was a wheelbarrow in one of the paths between the raised beds of vegetables and wildflowers. In the wheelbarrow was a crop of carrots, and what looked like rutabaga, beets, squash, beans, and more. “Wow,” said Brendan.

  “I love the harvest,” she said. “I’ve just got this last row and then I can clean up and we can talk. But we can talk too, now, absolutely. I’ll just be . . . let me just tend to this last bit.”

  “Of course,” Brendan smiled, and added, “I don’t feel so bad for being late.”

  She was already on her knees and leaning forward into a row of green sprigs of something. She lifted her head and turned to look at him. “Are you late? What time is it?”

  He took out his cell phone. “4:10.”

  She turned back to what she was doing. “Wow. It never ceases to amaze me how I just get lost out here.”

  “I’ll bet. What have you got?”

  She looked at him again, unsure what he meant.

  “For a yield, I mean. What did you grow?”

  “Oh. Everything and anything that will grow. Cucumber, peas, celery, beets, carrots, you name it. There’s some potatoes in that barrel there on the end. And herbs. Cilantro, Oregano, Basil, Dill, Mint. It’s tough to grow mint.”

  “It is?”

  “It looks like clematis. It just blends in. Chives are easy. Chives grow if you stomp on them and call them bad names. They just keep growing.”

  “Resilient.”

  He put his hands in his pockets, and suddenly felt strangely self-conscious. He found himself looking down at his appearance. He was wearing jean-like khaki pants and monk strap shoes, black. He had changed his shirt at the office before going to Boonville – it had been soaked with sweat – and opted for another button down, white. He felt oddly overdressed, like he ought to be in jeans and a t-shirt. He wondered how Olivia Jane kept her hours. Here it was mid-week and she was gardening at four p.m. Likely she made her own schedule.

  “So,” he said, “How does it work? With your . . . field? You’re out on your own, so to speak?”

  She nodded, her head half-buried in the greenery. “I got my licensure a few years ago after working with the county. I started my own private practice. Thing is, grief very often doesn’t want to come to you. You have to go to it.”

  “Denial,” he said softly.

  She retreated from the garden bed and glanced at him approvingly. “Exactly. The first step in the process of absorbing a tragedy or a loss doesn’t exactly get them out and about and ready to talk feelings.”

  Her attention returned to the vegetables. She started pulling several out, clumping them together. Bright orange carrots. “So I continue to work with Oneida, but it’s not at the clinic. They call me when someone has . . . well, you know.”

  “Right. So, how was he?”

  “Well,” she said, grunting and getting to her feet, “that’s a good question.” She turned and dropped the bunch of carrots in the wheel barrow. Then she dusted off her hands. “Let me go wash up. You drink iced coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  “Okay. Thanks for letting me finish that up. I hate leaving things undone.”

  “Me too,” he said. He followed her back into the house.

  * * *

  She sat him at the dining room table. The white curtains blew in the breeze coming in from the casement windows, which were swung open about half the way. She washed up and spent only a minute making the iced coffee – there was already coffee brewed in a pot on the stove, and she poured this over ice cubes, and added milk and sugar, per his approval. Then she sat down across from him.

  “Kevin is experiencing the acute loss of his sister, of that there is no question,” she said, affecting an instantaneously professional demeanor. “He also is a very troubled young guy.”

  “In what way?”

  She shrugged. “In every way. He resents his family, he is shiftless, without a job or what he feels is a calling. He doesn’t want his family’s money but he needs to live, so he feels bad about taking an allowance. He has no spiritual ballast that he can describe. He’s basically atheist, which there isn’t anything wrong with, but in his case, he’s searching for something.”

  “Where was he this morning? At the motel?”

  She raised an eyebrow. “That’s where your job begins and mine ends, Mr. Healy. I didn’t inquire as to his whereabouts. I tried to help him deal with the pain and loss of his departed older sister. My job is to help people try to find the coping mechanisms in their own lives to help them face the immense challenges that come with the loss of a loved one. It’s not easy. Most people, they do what they know how to do. They drink, they retreat into themselves, they engage in some sort of compulsive behavior, anything to keep distracted, to keep the pain and grief away. I’m not all rah rah, siss boom bah, bring on the pain; tha
t’s not the point. You don’t try to cultivate grief where there is none, or make yourself suffer if you are not. Sure, there’s healing in a good cry, but some people just don’t cry. Kevin, he’s not a stoic. I think his father is, but he’s not. He’s more sensitive. But he has no way to cope that I could see, or he could share with me.”

  “He seemed okay when I was with him,” Brendan said. He raised a hand from his coffee to indicate he wasn’t being argumentative. “I mean, he was certainly distraught. Which is why I wanted him to see . . . someone. But he seemed to be dealing.”

  He made a mental note that Olivia had mentioned the father, Alex, as if she knew something about him.

  “Sure, Kevin was dealing. I deal. You deal. We all deal. We’re more afraid of social impropriety than we are of actual, physical pain. That’s been shown in studies. It’s true. We’ll choose a broken arm over a public humiliation any old day of the week. That’s a lead-pipe cinch as my grandmother would say. We’re conditioned from a young age to have manners, be polite, speak in turn, and so on, until it becomes like a part of our DNA, like an instinct, like adrenaline. It’s actually quite easy to act like nothing is wrong.”

  “A huge habit,” he offered.

  “That’s right. Unless someone is oppositional-defiant, or has an anti-social personality, or these types of things, they tend to be very afraid of bad social graces.”

  “And you don’t think he has any of these . . . things you said?”

  “I don’t know, Mr. Healy. I just met him. I couldn’t diagnose that. Besides, that’s not my area. I work with grieving people. People who have just been in crisis. Their personalities, or any disorders certainly have bearing on how they cope with that grief, but I tend to consult with other therapists about that, wherever possible. Psychiatrists sometimes, too.”

  “But you said he was volatile.”

  “I said he was troubled. And that’s not to mince words. Is there something troubling you in particular?” Her eyes were kind but direct and no-nonsense.

  “It’s just that he lied to me.”

  “About?”

  “He said his sister, the victim, had no children. But, as it turns out, she does.”