How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  “I didn’t see any reference to this area in your background,” Roxanne had said, flipping through a document that probably held more information about his life than he wanted to know.

  “It was only during the summers, with my grandfather.”

  “But you’ve actually spent time in Port Hope?”

  Yes. He had spent time in Port Hope. He had fallen in love in Port Hope—with the sea, with the woods, and then, of course, with a girl. All of that had happened under the shadow of a man that the residents of Port Hope remembered far better than they’d remember his grandson. Ray Barrett had been in the ground for years, but there were still cracked bar mirrors and scarred men to mark his presence in Port Hope—some of both at the Harpoon, the bar where Kimberly Crepeaux had allegedly revealed her knowledge of the Pelletier and Kelly case, the bar Rob’s grandfather had once owned.

  Roxanne Donovan had predicted he’d be needed in Maine for “a week or two.”

  That had been two months ago. Kimberly Crepeaux had not confessed easily, but when she’d broken, she’d offered a thorough account.

  And now it was Barrett’s job to share all those details with the victims’ families.

  3

  They were very different families. While Howard Pelletier kept patient faith, George and Amy Kelly had hammered away with daily calls, criticisms, and suggestions. George’s family had been spending summers in Maine for three generations, but George and Amy had been overseas the previous summer, so their son had gone up alone. For a time after Ian and Jackie went missing, the Kellys’ summer retreat had been a base camp for the investigation. Then the tips went cold and their son stayed gone, and George and Amy Kelly went back down south but kept the calls up.

  Barrett dialed their home number in Virginia. Most of his conversations had been with Amy, though George was always on the phone. He often became too emotional to speak, and then he’d mute his line and just listen. They liked videoconference calls, and in an attempt to handle his son’s homicide like a business matter, George would take the calls in his office, where he could sit at the desk and turn his back to the bookcases lined with pictures of Ian playing tennis, Ian playing soccer, Ian with a diploma.

  Ian with a smile. Always that hundred-watt smile.

  Today, Barrett was on speakerphone but not video when he relayed Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession.

  “You’re sure?” Amy Kelly asked, and then, before Barrett could answer, she said, “Of course you’re sure.”

  Amy and George were attorneys, and they’d vetted Barrett as if they were appointing him to the investigation instead of accepting him from the FBI. They knew better than anyone that his expertise was confessions—getting the real ones, and cutting through the false ones. When he said he’d gotten the truth, they knew they should believe him.

  All the same, they seemed to struggle with accepting the Ma-thias Burke narrative.

  George and Amy had known Mathias long before he’d surfaced as a suspect in their son’s homicide. For three summers, they’d employed him as a caretaker and groundskeeper at their summerhouse on the coast. Amy had resisted the early accusations, saying she had good instincts, and she trusted Mathias Burke.

  She wasn’t the only one to have voiced that opinion. Mathias was a multigeneration local, and he was also a local source of pride. At the age of eight, he’d been pulling weeds and raking leaves in his neighborhood; by the time he was ten he was mowing lawns; at sixteen he purchased his first truck and trailer and began to give the professional caretakers a challenge. He was only twenty-nine now but owned a caretaking business that spanned three counties and employed more than a dozen people. He handled landscaping, remodeling, alarm-system installations, paving, and trash hauling. Whatever need the summer people might have, Mathias Burke would meet it—or he’d produce someone reliable for the task. His reputation was often distilled down to a single word: ambitious.

  It had taken Barrett a while to convince people that ambition did not prevent a man from driving erratically while high and drunk.

  Kimberly Crepeaux’s involvement was an easier sell. Her family had a long legacy of petty crime in an area with a nearly nonexistent crime rate, and they were even better known for their struggles with alcohol. Kimberly—or Kimmy, as she was known to all the locals—had graduated from alcohol to heroin, and her arrest rate had soared accordingly. She’d brought suspicion on herself by drunkenly telling acquaintances that the police weren’t close to the truth in the case or asserting her innocence and lack of knowledge about the situation without being prompted.

  By the time Barrett began his interviews with her, the dominant police theory was that an accident had turned into a body dump, and the amount of chatter coming from the heroin networks suggested drugs had been involved in the accident. The horrific story Kimberly had finally told him contained only one real shock: the identity of the man behind the wheel who’d wielded both a pipe and a knife to turn a possible manslaughter into a chilling double murder.

  That was not the Mathias Burke who was the paragon of the peninsula.

  After he’d shared Kimberly Crepeaux’s story, Barrett told Amy and George what he was still missing.

  “I do not have the truck.”

  The truck was the first thing Kimberly had offered up. While maintaining that it was only a rumor and certainly nothing she’d seen personally, she had described it in vivid detail and linked it to Mathias. Initially, it had seemed like a promising lead—Mathias Burke, either personally or through his caretaking company, owned nine trucks, from standard pickups to extended-cab diesels to plow trucks. Unfortunately, none of them remotely matched Kimberly’s description, and no other witnesses could recall seeing him with such a truck. If anything, they dismissed it. Mathias Burke liked nice vehicles, everyone informed Barrett. A beat-up Dodge Dakota with a strange paint job on the hood was simply not his style.

  But now Kimberly was firm on the story, Barrett told the Kellys, and the only other witness was dead—Cass Odom had overdosed three days after Jackie and Ian disappeared.

  George Kelly spoke for the first time in several minutes then. “But you won’t need the truck if you’ve got a confession and a…” He paused before he said, “Body.”

  “Not for an arrest, but I’ll certainly want it for prosecution,” Barrett said. The idea of a trial was intimidating when his case currently rode the skinny shoulders of one shaky witness.

  “I’m sure by then you will have it,” George said.

  “Yes.”

  There was another pause, and then Amy Kelly said, “So we’ll know tomorrow. When the dive team goes in, we will know for certain what happened to Ian.”

  “We’ll know more tomorrow, yes. I will call you as soon as the dive team has results.”

  Results? They all knew what they were looking for: Ian’s corpse.

  In a distant and vacant voice, Amy delivered the inevitable words: she thanked Barrett for his time and effort.

  He had no idea what to say. He had just told a father and mother that their son had been beaten with a pipe, wrapped in plastic while still breathing, stabbed, and drowned.

  You’re welcome.

  He’d begun the call by expressing sympathy, telling them how intensely he hated to give them this news, and he didn’t wish to repeat those sentiments so frequently that they sounded empty. He responded to Amy Kelly’s gratitude simply by reiterating that he would call them as soon as he had information from the dive team.

  Even though the divers had yet to enter the water, the conversation felt final, though he knew it wasn’t. The confession was really just a new beginning. Next would come the bodies, then the trials, and the Kelly family would be in the courtroom facing Kimberly Crepeaux and Mathias Burke. They would see photographs, listen to forensic experts, watch laser pointers dance around their son’s bones, and hear testimony from the accused.

  When I looked up at where his head was, the plastic sucked in and moved out and then sucked in again, and
I realized he was breathing.

  No, this was anything but the end of the horror for George and Amy Kelly.

  Having delivered news of the confession to Virginia, Barrett hung up the phone and drove toward the Maine coast. There was no ferry to Little Spruce Island, but he knew a local who would take him.

  He would tell Jackie Pelletier’s father the truth of his daughter’s death in person.

  4

  Barrett reached Little Spruce Island about an hour before sunset. The bay was tranquil, the water calm, and as he stepped off the boat and onto the dock, he could hear the sound of a hammer. It made him wince, because he knew the source.

  Howard Pelletier was finishing his daughter’s studio.

  Howard was a third-generation lobsterman, but after his wife, Patricia, was killed in a car wreck in a March snowstorm when their daughter was eleven years old, his days on the water became a secondary concern. So did everything except Jackie.

  The stories Barrett had heard about the two of them were legion and lovely: how he’d anguished over learning to make ponytails and braids, how he’d walked her to school each day with her hand in his, how he’d fished during the fall and winter so he could have more time with her in the summer, even though it meant forsaking the safer money and weather for the season when gales howled and waves threw ice over the decks. He’d done carpentry in the summer and returned to the water when Jackie returned to school. Caring for her had been the sole focus of his days, and then she was a teenager, and suddenly she seemed to be caring for him as much as he was for her. When she was fifteen, she’d signed up for cooking classes in Camden, then made every meal so her overextended father could have one less task. He’d sent her to sixth grade with a clumsy French braid; three years later, she sent him back to the water with gourmet sandwiches whose ingredients he couldn’t pronounce. A father and daughter once defined by tragedy had become a testament to resilience. To say that the people of Port Hope cared about the Pelletiers was an understatement; they were beloved. And they were spoken of together, always, two halves that made a whole, Howard and Jackie, Jackie and Howard.

  Some thought it was a fear of leaving her father alone that had kept Jackie from going to college. She was an aspiring artist, and though she had exceptional grades, she never submitted a college application. Howard’s family had an old cottage on Little Spruce, and his daughter fell in love with the island. Upon graduating from high school, she’d moved out to the cottage. She took the ferry back to the mainland each morning to work at a grocery store and, in the summer, spent weekends behind the bar at a seafood restaurant. Jackie worked sixty-hour weeks during the tourist season and told anyone who would listen what she was saving for: an elevated studio space that would be built beside the family’s old island cottage, something tall enough to give her a grand view back toward the harbor, where the sunrises lit the Maine coast.

  Howard Pelletier began construction on the building five days after she disappeared.

  When she comes home, he’d say, this will help. Whatever hell she’s been through, this place will ease it.

  The longer his daughter stayed missing, the more elaborate the studio design became. He redid his original roofing to provide for additional skylights, added a lofted daybed (In case she wants to take a nap up here, you know, a little spot for when she needs a break). Everyone understood the progressive complexities.

  He couldn’t stop.

  If he stopped, it meant she wasn’t coming home.

  Rob Barrett stood on the dock at the Little Spruce Island wharf for a long time, listening to that hammering, before he started up the hill.

  Howard smiled when he saw Barrett approaching.

  “Agent Barrett, how are you?” he said, stepping through the open door with his hand extended. He was just a shade over five feet tall, a foot shorter than Barrett, but thick with muscle, a fireplug build, stronger at fifty than most men were at twenty.

  “It’s just Rob.” This was as much a ritual as the smiles and handshakes.

  “It’ll be Rob when you retire. Till then, you’re an agent, right?”

  Before Barrett could respond, Howard waved a hand at the interior behind him, which smelled of clean wood and sawdust and was lit by spotlights clamped to the wall studs.

  “You can see I made a little change,” he said, and Barrett saw that the staircase was gone. Howard had spent frigid winter evenings finishing the steps with coat after coat of stain, a beautiful, rich maple. Now they were missing.

  “I got to thinking,” Howard said, “that she was always comparing the studio she wanted to a lighthouse or a tree house, you know? She wanted to be up high, feel like she was someplace magical. That was her word. Way I figure it, walking up a straight set of stairs, where’s the magic in that? But if it has that curve, that spiral, it’s like you’re heading someplace special. So you’re not just walking up, you’re…what’s the word I’m looking for? You’re…” He made a sweeping gesture with his small, thick hand, lifting it from belt level to eye level in a slow arc.

  “Ascending,” Barrett said, and Howard Pelletier’s eyes lit up.

  “Ayuh,” he said in his old-time Yankee dialect. “Ascending. Ayuh, that’s just the word. Once I get it framed in, you’ll see what I mean. She’ll walk up there and it’ll feel like she’s ascending.”

  Barrett said, “Howard, I’ve got some news.”

  The first flicker of fear showed on Howard’s weathered face, but he blinked hard and pushed it back. He was good at this by now. While each week without answers had drained the hope from George and Amy Kelly, those weeks had given Howard Pelletier time to lay the foundation of his faith in Jackie’s unlikely return, to scour the Internet for reports of those who’d gone missing only to be reunited with their loved ones years later. He knew all those stories. He’d shared them with Barrett often.

  So now, hearing the promise of news, he wiped his hands on his pants, nodded enthusiastically, and said, “Good, good! A real lead this time?”

  Barrett had trouble finding his voice, and when he finally spoke, the words seemed to come from behind him and far away.

  “A confession.”

  Howard sat down slowly. Eased right down onto the floor and sat like a child, legs stretched out in front of him, head bowed. He gathered a small mound of sawdust and squeezed it tight in his fist. Then he said, “Tell me.”

  So Barrett told it for the second time that day. He told Howard Pelletier as the man sat on the floor he’d laid in the building with the missing stairs, and Howard did not speak. He just rocked a little bit and kept opening and closing his small, muscular hands, crushing loose sawdust into tight packets that he would then toss idly at the door, like someone skipping rocks on a pond.

  “Could be lying,” he whispered when Barrett had finished. “Story like that, from a girl like that? Kimmy Crepeaux wouldn’t know an honest word if it bit her on the ass.”

  “Maybe she is lying,” Barrett said. “Hopefully she is. We’ll know tomorrow, when the divers search the pond. I need you to be ready for that, Howard.”

  Howard had closed his eyes when Barrett said divers. He kept them closed when he said, “When do they go in?”

  “First light. We’d have gone today, but we didn’t want the divers to run out of daylight. Once the search starts, people will talk, and the media will show up fast. We want the scene secured and plenty of time for the dive team.”

  Howard shook his head, and then opened his eyes.

  “A bullshit story,” he said. “Crepeaux, she stands to gain something here, yeah? She’s got other charges. You told me that. Did you offer her a deal on those?”

  “It wasn’t my call to make. That’s the prosecutor’s decision.”

  “Oh, but she’s got a deal, don’t she? You tell me the truth now.”

  Barrett nodded.

  “There you go,” Howard said. “You won’t find ’em. She’s told a tale to help herself out of the rest of her mess. I’m sorry you gotta inve
stigate lies like that.”

  Barrett said, “I just wanted you to hear it from me first.”

  “You won’t find ’em,” Howard said, and the tears came then. He wiped them away as if they’d been a mistake, but more came, and he gave up and wept, quietly but painfully, and Barrett sat down in the sawdust with him and waited. They sat there for a long time, and even when the tears stopped, neither of them spoke. Finally, Howard got his breathing steadied and whispered, “Has Mathias Burke been arrested?”

  “Not yet. The prosecutor wants the”—Barrett caught himself before he said bodies—“the evidence first. He’s under surveillance, though. I expect he’ll be in jail by noon.”

  Howard nodded. He was staring straight ahead, out the still-open door toward the rocky cliffs and pine trees and the setting sun, the panorama his daughter had so loved.

  “You know I showed her that old graveyard,” he said. “I told you that, right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Took her up there in, it was, uh, it was her sixth-grade year. Showed her the way you could put paper over one of them old stones and rub it with charcoal and…” He mimicked the circular motion of the grave rubbings. “They came back to life. The names, I mean. She thought that was so special. Not the way most kids her age would have, like it was just a trick, but special because she knew that represented a life. Special that we could still learn their names and say them and so they wouldn’t be…forgotten.”

  His thick chest moved in jerks as he fought for steady breath.

  “So, ayuh, I showed her the graveyard.”

  “She loved that place,” Barrett said, “because you showed it to her. Do not let yourself think of any—”