“It’s just us for dinner, right? Mick is working?” Jake asks.
“Yes. Maybe I can throw something together.”
“We can order takeout, or I can have leftover meatloaf.”
Stop it! She wants to scream. Stop being so nice to me, because you’re only making things worse!
I don’t deserve you!
I deserve . . .
She takes a deep breath. It’s not about what she deserves. It’s about what Jake deserves.
The truth.
When Kurt Walker’s phone rings, he’s already in bed. It’s not particularly late, but it’s been a long day and all he wants to do is watch some television and get some sleep.
But when he sees the Florida area code accompanied by the name Robert Belinke in the caller ID panel, he quickly snatches up the phone. Bob is his stepfather’s lifelong best friend, and the one person in the world Kurt would expect to hear from if something happened to Rick.
“Bob? What’s wrong?”
Like Rick, Bob is a pull-no-punches Midwesterner. He wastes no time on small talk, or trying to convince Kurt that everything is fine, because clearly, it isn’t.
“Have you talked to your stepfather lately?”
“No, but I’ve been trying to get ahold of him for a few days. He left me a message on Sunday night.”
“Really? What did he say?”
“Just that he needed to talk to me. But he left it on my home phone and I spent the weekend at my girlfriend’s apartment, so I didn’t get it until last night.”
“I’ve been trying to reach him, too,” Bob says, “and I’m a little worried. I was supposed to meet him for dinner last night—I was in New York for the past couple of days—but at the last minute, he couldn’t make it.”
“Why not?”
“Subway trouble, he said.”
“There was subway trouble last night during rush hour,” Kurt assures him, just in case Bob is doubting Rick’s explanation. “Definitely.” He chooses not to mention what he read in this morning’s newspaper: that someone jumped in front of a train. Suicide.
“I know,” Bob says, “but I offered to meet him after that, and he didn’t want to.”
“So you heard from him later last night?”
“Yes, but not since then.”
“That’s good, though.” That was just twenty-four hours ago. Bob is jumping the gun on being alarmed. “How did he sound?”
“It was just a text. The thing is, he hasn’t called me back today. I just want to make sure he’s okay. I know you don’t live right around the corner, but—”
“I’ll try him again, but I’m sure he’s fine. Sometimes he just sort of . . . drops out for a while. Especially since my mom . . . you know.”
“I’m so sorry about your mom. I really am.”
“Thanks. It’s been a year, but it’s still hard.”
“I’m sure it is. On everyone. Including Rick.”
Kurt’s pulse quickens. “They were divorced.”
“I’m aware, and I’ve been through it myself, so I know that kids take sides after something like that. But I hope you kids understand that what happened to your mother wasn’t Rick’s fault. It wasn’t anyone’s fault.”
“Do you know how my mother died, Bob?” Kurt is up out of bed, striding across the small room. “Because it’s not like it was from natural causes, or an accident. She didn’t get hit by a bus or have a heart attack. She climbed into the bathtub and she slit her freaking wrists.”
“I know that. I’m sorry.”
“It didn’t have to happen.”
“Your father feels the same way. I talked to him about it over the weekend. He told me she’d started taking prescription antidepressants that came with a suicide risk, and he’s blaming himself for that even though she’d been dealing with depression on and off for years. I just want to make sure you kids aren’t blaming him as well.”
Kurt stares at the framed photo on his cluttered dresser top. It shows his mother, young and pretty as a china doll, holding him on her lap. He was just a toddler. Both their faces are cast in shadow; it belongs to the photographer, his biological father, whose long silhouette falls over the photo.
Sure, she was depressed from time to time. Look what she went through. But . . .
“I can’t speak for my brother or my half brother and half sister,” he tells Bob after a long moment. “I promise you that I’m not blaming Rick for what happened to my mother, though. He’s the only father I ever knew.”
“I’m glad to hear that. I know he thought of you and your brother as his own sons, and your mom . . . well, it started out a really good thing, and it just didn’t work out in the end. It happens. But—”
Exhausted, Kurt stops him there. “I know all that. It’s okay.”
God, it’s been a long day. A long year. One year, one week, and one day since his mother died.
“Look, if I don’t get ahold of him tonight, and if the others haven’t heard from him, either, then I’ll go over and check on him first thing in the morning,” Kurt promises Bob. “Okay?”
“Okay. And when you reach him, tell him to call me right away. I’m going to talk him into coming down to Florida to visit me over Christmas. You can all come if you want. I’ve got plenty of room.”
“We might just do that. Thanks. I’ll call you tomorrow.”
When Rowan told Jake to sit down—on the only uncluttered seat in her office, the antique fainting couch—she’d fully intended to start from the beginning and tell him the whole truth.
The problem: the beginning—the real beginning—was so long ago and far away that she kept getting sidetracked.
“Why are you telling me this?” Jake asks edgily, as she recounts the first time she ever cut class in high school.
“I just feel like . . . you know, I’ve done some not great things in my past, and—”
“We all have.”
“You?” She shakes her head. “Please. The only bad thing you ever did was senior prank.”
Jake and a couple of his friends were, in fact, elevated to folk hero status following the legendary “missing piglet” incident at the high school shortly before graduation.
“Anyway,” she adds, “that was genius, and they didn’t even press charges, so it doesn’t count as getting into trouble.”
“Not true.”
“That it was genius?”
“No, that it’s the only bad thing I ever did. It’s the only one I’ve told you about.”
“What else did you do? Chew gum in class?”
“Does this have something to do with Mick?”
“Mick? Why?”
“Because I’ve been thinking about him all day and I’m guessing you have too.”
She flashes back to the conversation in the car when she drove her son to work.
“We both know he didn’t really have to take a test first thing this morning, Ro.”
“If we both know it, then why am I the only one who acknowledged it?”
“Because you’re the mom, I guess.” Seeing the look on her face, he adds, “Bad answer? Only one I’ve got. Sorry. I guess I’ve been preoccupied with work and I’m a little slow figuring things out.”
“I talked to him this afternoon. He said he had an argument with one of his friends.”
“And . . . ?”
“And that’s why he’s been upset.”
He shrugs. “Maybe that’s true, but it’s not all that’s going on with him. And even if it were—which it’s not—it’s no excuse for lying.”
“You’re right. There’s no excuse for lying,” she says quietly.
“He lied about coming home on time on Saturday night, too. I’ll admit I was dozing on the couch, but I woke up a few times after midnight, and I kn
ow he wasn’t here when he should have been.”
“Katie missed curfew a few times, too.”
“She never lied about it.”
No. She wouldn’t lie.
“Are you hungry?” Jake asks, looking at his watch. “I’ve had Italian food on the brain all day.”
“I meant to make dinner. I just—”
“No, it’s no big deal. Why don’t we go over to Marrana’s? We can drive Mick home when he’s done with his shift. Maybe he’ll talk to us.”
“So you think he’s in some kind of trouble?”
“Serious trouble? No. But he lied to us and his grades stink. I think we’d better sit him down and deal with it.” He starts to get up off the fainting couch.
“Jake. Wait.”
“What?”
“I didn’t finish telling you what I was telling you.”
“Oh. Right.” He looks at his watch again. “Can we finish talking about it over dinner? It’s getting late.”
He has absolutely no clue that for perhaps the first time in their marriage, she’s trying to tell him something so grave that it can’t possibly be discussed in public over Cavatelli a la Mama.
She was planning to take her sister’s advice and tell him what happened fourteen years ago—
“Fourteen years ago!” Noreen kept saying. “It’s ancient history. Just get it out in the open, say you’re sorry, show him the stupid snow globe, and move on.”
She made it sound so simple.
The reality is anything but.
I can’t do this right now, Rowan decides. If she does, it will blow up and envelop them both. They won’t be able to deal with Mick, or . . . with anything.
Maybe it’s an excuse.
Maybe it’s a valid reason to wait to tell him until later, or tomorrow, or . . .
Maybe he doesn’t need to know after all.
“Marrana’s sounds good,” she tells him, noticing that the desk drawer where she stashed the snow globe is open slightly. She pushes it closed as she stands.
Barnes went home to get some sleep an hour ago after extracting a promise from Sully that she’d do the same thing as soon as she finished her paperwork.
Now that it’s done, however, instead of gathering her things and heading out into the night, she decides to spend a little more time searching the databases.
Having identified weather as a possible trigger or a draw that might have lured a transient killer, she and Barnes had identified several catastrophic storms over the past year. A few—a category 2 Caribbean hurricane and a deadly Oklahoma tornado—were likely beyond their perp’s range. But she can’t stop thinking about the massive Labor Day nor’easter.
All six New England states were affected, as was Long Island. There were no related homicides during that time frame, but they were searching a large area, both in population and in geography.
Wondering if they’d missed something earlier, Sully again combs the records for female slashing victims. This time, she finds one—a Boston prostitute—but she was brunette and of Asian descent, and doesn’t fit the victimology. Anyway, her pimp was later arrested for the crime, had confessed, and is behind bars.
Turning her attention back to the missing persons files, Sully embarks on a state by state search, focusing on the areas that were hardest hit by the storm.
In Vermont, she hits pay dirt.
A female college senior in Burlington has been missing since September 11, four days after the storm passed through.
She had long red hair.
She’d grown up in New York City and lost her beloved godmother in the World Trade Center attacks. According to the case file, her friends reported that the anniversary always brought her down, but she’d been more depressed than usual this year because their sorority house had been without power for several days. Suicide had not been ruled out, though no evidence of that had ever turned up; nor had her body.
At the time she disappeared, much of storm-ravaged Burlington was still flooded by Lake Champlain and littered with downed trees and power lines. The area was crawling with reporters, relief workers, repairmen, contractors, insurance inspectors . . .
Somewhere among them, Sully is now convinced, lurked a killer with a straight-edged razor and a deadly obsession with redheads.
From the Mundy’s Landing Tribune Archives
Police Blotter
March 28, 1984
A Mundy’s Landing teen is safely back home after a massive search that began Tuesday evening when her parents reported her missing. Believing she was safely in her bedroom, they had noticed nothing amiss throughout the evening, but called police when they discovered the bedroom empty shortly after eleven o’clock. Following an extensive overnight search, the teen returned to her parents’ home mid-afternoon of her own accord. She stated that she had traveled out of state to a rock concert. Her identity is being withheld due to her age.
Chapter 14
Dressing for the field trip on Wednesday morning, Rowan can hear Jake singing in the shower.
He wouldn’t be doing that if she’d had the chance to tell him what she wanted to tell him last night.
Now who’s a coward? she scolds herself as she pulls a red sweater over her white blouse and zips her feet into a pair of warm boots.
It hadn’t taken much for Jake to sidetrack her efforts to bare her soul last night.
All he had to do was offer to take her out to dinner, and she dropped the whole plan.
As they drove over to Marrana’s, she toyed with the idea of continuing the conversation over dinner and even momentarily convinced herself that it wasn’t as big a deal as she’d made it out to be. As Noreen had pointed out, Jake isn’t likely to walk out of their marriage over something that had happened fourteen years ago . . .
Is he?
Wasn’t Noreen the one who’d acted as though Rowan might as well sew on a scarlet letter back when she first confessed to having kissed Rick?
It is a big deal.
She realized she couldn’t tell him about it in a restaurant over dinner. It would have to wait.
Marrana’s was jam-packed last night, and short-handed. Mick was single-handedly bussing tables as the other busboy, Zach Willet, took orders.
“Did you get promoted?” Rowan asked him, surprised when he came over to wait on them.
“Nah, one of the waitresses didn’t show up so they asked me to fill in. I’ve never done this before,” he added nervously.
“I’m sure you’ll do a great job,” Jake said.
He was wrong.
Poor Zach fumbled their order and fumbled their plates—dropping Rowan’s soup and Jake’s dessert.
“The only thing he hasn’t figured out how to drop is the check,” Jake whispered after they’d sat waiting for it, yawning and trying to get Zach’s attention.
When he finally brought it over, he apologized and said, “You don’t have to tip me.”
“Poor kid,” Jake said to Rowan, pulling out his wallet as Zach hurried away.
“You’re leaving him twenty percent, right?”
“Nope.”
She frowned and started to protest.
“I’m leaving him fifty percent.”
They smiled at each other, and she realized how much she loved him and how much she dreaded hurting him.
But she knew she had to do it, and she meant to, she really did . . .
As they drove Mick home from work, Rowan asked if he’d also been asked to pinch hit for the absent waitress.
“No, just Zach. I’m not good enough.”
“Is that what they said?” Jake asked.
“That’s what I say.”
That evolved into a predictable and unpleasant conversation—between Jake and Mick, anyway—about taking pride in your work and bein
g ambitious, which led to slammed car doors on the driveway and Mick stomping up the stairs to slam his bedroom door, too.
“We were supposed to talk about his schoolwork,” Jake protested to Rowan, who could only shrug helplessly.
They were supposed to talk about a lot of things.
He walked Doofus, and she pretended to be asleep when he came to bed.
Long after Jake really had drifted off, she lay awake thinking about the snow globe.
She knows what she has to do today. She has to talk to Rick, and she has to talk to Jake. She’s not sure in which order.
He comes whistling into the bedroom with a towel wrapped around his waist.
“Is that a new skirt?” he asks, gesturing at the gray wool plaid one she has on.
“I’ve had it forever.”
“I like it.”
Oh, Jake. Why do you have to be so sweet today, of all days? Why can’t you pick a fight with me the way you do with Mick?
“Thanks,” she murmurs, and heads for the hallway. “I’ve got to get going.”
“Firing up the griddle? Bacon and omelets again? I’ll take extra cheese this time.”
“Jake! I told you, that was—” Turning back, she sees that he’s grinning.
“I was kidding. Have fun on your field trip, babe. Don’t forget that I won’t be home until really late.”
“I already forgot. Why?”
“The dinner.”
“Which dinner?”
“The one at Hattie’s.”
Hattie’s . . . ?
“You mean Hattie’s in Saratoga Springs?”
“What other Hattie’s is there?” he asks with a grin. Hattie’s Chicken Shack is a Saratoga institution and one of their favorite places to eat whenever they get up that way for a long weekend—which they haven’t done in at least a few years.
“Today is the regional sales meeting,” he adds. “Remember?”
“Of course I remember. I just didn’t know about Hattie’s.”
“I told you about it the other day.”
Which other day?
The day I was sneaking around the city meeting Rick Walker for lunch?
I don’t deserve Jake. And he deserves the truth. Tonight.
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