How It Happened

by Michael Koryta

  22

  He never checked into a motel. He spent the remaining hours of the night driving, got halfway to Liz’s house before he turned around and worked his way back along the coast, chasing moonlight along the back roads, and as dawn broke he went to a Dunkin’ Donuts in Rockland and drank coffee and thought about calling Liz, or Roxanne Donovan, or Don Johansson. He knew that he should make someone aware of his return and of what he’d just been told by Howard Pelletier.

  He didn’t make any calls.

  I’ll speak to Kimberly first, he told himself. I’ll do that much, and then let people know.

  It could cost him his job. That idea should have seemed threatening, but after all the months in Bozeman, it didn’t. The career he’d anticipated with the Bureau was gone, and he saw his FBI future clearly: a succession of satellite offices, waiting to become pension-eligible in someplace like Iowa or Indiana.

  There were other options. The damage he’d done to his future as an agent wouldn’t reach back to his reputation as a professor. But he’d wanted to do the work, not write about it or lecture about it.

  He’d wanted to close cases.

  Most of America was still asleep by the time he reached the wharf at Port Hope, but there the day was already well in motion—the only fishermen who hadn’t headed out were the ones who wouldn’t last more than a season or two. Howard Pelletier’s boat—the Jackie II, named after her as a reminder of what he was working for, what kept him heading out on rough water and in harsh winds—was gone from its mooring, but his skiff remained. He’d have rowed out so Barrett could have the skiff, which was a fourteen-foot aluminum boat with a small outboard, not so different from the one that Barrett’s grandfather had owned.

  The water was different, though. Even on a calm day in a sheltered bay, and even across so short a distance as Port Hope to Little Spruce, the North Atlantic could remind you of what it really was beyond that pretty face.

  As Barrett cast off from the dock and motored away from Port Hope, farther out into the bay, toward the open sea, the morning sun was winning the fight with the fog and the breeze had come to its aid, pushing back the fog in long gusts like strokes of a whisk broom. Each gust seemed to reveal a little more of the coast—high, packed pines that appeared black where they grew thickest, and gray granite cliffs carved jagged by wind and water. This ocean always whispered reminders of its power. It was beautiful, but it was also brutally honest. There were few sandy beaches; there were many battered rocks. It was an ocean that seemed intent on announcing that it hadn’t been conquered, only coped with. Anyone who told you that it had been conquered had not sailed out of Bar Harbor or Belfast in foul weather.

  It took him twenty minutes to make it to Little Spruce, and he was freezing in his jeans and chambray shirt and sneakers, the lazy casual attire of the airport rendered ridiculous out here on the water, as if he were wearing a sandwich-board sign identifying himself as a rube. The good news was that all the locals had headed out earlier, leaving nobody to gawk at the sight of a tourist stealing a workingman’s boat.

  When he arrived at Little Spruce, the dock was empty. The island was home to only summer cottages and a dozen diehards like Jackie Pelletier, but it was too small to offer any of the year-round potential of Vinalhaven, Islesboro, and Monhegan, with their fishing communities and ferries. Little Spruce was about beauty, plain and simple, and it held no shortage of that.

  The last time he’d been on the island it was to notify Howard Pelletier of Kimberly Crepeaux’s confession. Now he tied up and climbed the ladder to the weathered pier and headed back up the slope to find the same woman and tell her that he was going to listen again—just one more time, that was all.

  Just once more.

  The studio looked as he remembered it except for the addition of a set of gleaming padlocks on steel hasps. The ancient but solid cottage beside it offered no trace of change, and when he knocked, there was no sound inside, and for an instant he thought that either she was gone or she’d never been here at all, that it was all a cruel tease designed by Howard Pelletier as repayment for the one Barrett had given him. Then the door opened and he stood face-to-face with Kimberly Crepeaux for the first time since he’d visited her in jail on the day the divers had searched the empty pond.

  Unlike Howard, who’d seemed to age years in the past few months, she looked unchanged, the short and slight girl with a fragile, almost birdlike bone structure. She seemed likely to blow away in a strong wind, but she was also the only person who’d ever sat across from Barrett and confessed to plunging a knife into a wounded man’s stomach before drowning him.

  “You’re back,” she said matter-of-factly. The lack of surprise gave him a sudden realization.

  “How does Howard contact you? There’s no cell reception out here.”

  “He gave me some kind of radio. He called it ship-to-shore or something? That way I can talk to him and to my little girl, you know?”

  Ship-to-shore phones were expensive. Howard’s investment in Kimberly Crepeaux was growing quickly.

  “I guess he can get your attention,” Kimberly said with a touch of petulance. “I never got a call back when I needed help.”

  Her tone-deafness was astonishing. Barrett said, “Your story and your recanting—do you understand what those meant to people other than you? Do you even think about that, Kimberly? Ever?”

  She blinked her pale green eyes at him in confusion. “Of course I do. It’s why I went to see him. To make things right.”

  “To make things right.”

  She nodded. Her pupils were pinpoints, and he wondered if she was using again.

  “I thought my only option was to pretend I’d lied. Once you couldn’t find the bodies, what other choice did I have?”

  She said that like an accusation, like it was Barrett’s fault that she was in this fix.

  “I could not find the bodies,” he said, “because they were not where you promised they would be. I am also now supposed to believe that your original story was the truth, despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite the fingerprints and DNA linking Jeffrey Girard to those murders.”

  “Oh, I think I understand that now.” She leaned against the door frame, regarding him with pride. “He might’ve helped move them. See, I heard all sorts of stuff you don’t know about.”

  “Where did you hear all this?”

  “In jail, mostly.”

  Barrett nodded and looked away from her, out to the glittering sea, the adrenaline fading into fatigue. Here we go again. Kimberly and her jailhouse stories. What sort of idiot do you have to be to come all the way back out here and listen to more of them?

  “Mathias is going to kill me,” she said. “Or have somebody do it. Just because he got out of it, that doesn’t mean he’ll let it go. Me talking to you, telling you how it happened? That’ll get me killed.” She rubbed her arms, shivering in the wind off the ocean. “Come on inside so I don’t freeze, would you?”

  “No.”

  “What?”

  “Go get a jacket if you need one. We’re taking a field trip, Kimberly.”

  She looked more fearful at this prospect than she had when she proclaimed that Mathias Burke intended to kill her.

  “What are you talking about? I don’t want to go talk to more cops. Nobody listens, and they’ll just—”

  “We aren’t going to see any cops. We’re going to the pond.”

  She stopped rubbing her arms. “I don’t want to go back there. Not ever again.”

  “That’s why we’re going,” he said. “It’s what I should have done the first time.”

  He’d made his academic reputation by critiquing the police obsession with physical reactions of suspects. He was convinced that he needed only the words. Now, in practice, he was not so sure. Kimberly was a fine storyteller, but he didn’t think much of her as an actress. If that place mattered to her, he thought she would show it.

  “I’m not going,” she said, jutting her chi
n like a pouting child, but her eyes were wide and truly afraid.

  “Then I’m leaving.”

  She bit her lower lip and stared past him, back toward the mainland. The wind picked up and tousled her hair and she reached up and pushed it back from her face. Her shirtsleeve slid up when she did that, and he looked for needle tracks but didn’t see any. That didn’t mean much, though. She could be snorting or smoking.

  “Okay,” she said then in a soft but firm voice. “I’ve got her ghost all around me out here already. If I can stand it here, I can stand it out there.”

  23

  They didn’t speak much on the boat. He watched her grow progressively more nervous as they neared the Port Hope landing. She kept her head down as she climbed off the boat but her eyes were active, darting. Barrett didn’t recognize anyone except one woman who was smoking a cigarette outside the general store. She worked the breakfast and lunch counter inside, and she knew him and certainly knew Kimberly. She turned away as if she hadn’t recognized them, but he knew that she had, and he knew that she would talk.

  He pulled away from the wharf and then drove up the hill and turned right, onto the Port Hope Road. Kimberly took out a cigarette and lit it. She jiggled her left leg, jittery, and turned her cell phone idly in her hand, but he never saw her touch the screen. When they turned onto the Archer’s Mill Road, the speed of her nervous gestures increased, her leg hammering like a piston. Barrett watched her carefully as they drove past the Orchard Cemetery. She kept her face away from it, and in the bright morning sun, she looked as pale as some of the limestone grave markers.

  When they reached the dirt drive that led to the camp above the cove, Barrett pulled onto the shoulder and parked in the grass. Kimberly’s leg had gone still. She kept her head turned toward the window so he couldn’t see her face.

  “All right,” he said. “Let’s have a look.”

  She set her cell phone in the console but tucked her cigarettes into her pocket and pushed open the door with grim acceptance, like someone entering a booking room.

  When they got out of the car and started down the drive, he realized that his own heart was pounding. He’d been curious if the place would trigger any authentic emotional reaction from Kimberly, but he hadn’t counted on it doing it to him.

  The drive curled around the massive boulder that was nearly as tall as the cabin beside it and then they were facing the cove.

  There was no evidence that anything had ever disrupted the peacefulness of this spot. It was as tranquil as ever, the sky clear and the air scented with pine needles. The water was flat and still and dark, its surface reflecting the trees and sky but denying any glimpses of what lay at the bottom.

  There was no raft in the cove, and the cabin windows were boarded over, but that was no surprise—this far north, most people didn’t open up their seasonal camps until after Memorial Day. Barrett remembered where the raft had been, though. He had no trouble at all triangulating its position and was just about to point it out to Kimberly when she walked away from him.

  She went down to the water’s edge, where cattails were beginning to grow in, and he saw that her thin shoulders were shaking. He walked up onto one of the boulders so he could see her face.

  She was crying without making a sound. Crying and shaking and staring into that water like something was going to emerge from it and grasp her by the throat.

  She’s a better actor than you thought.

  But he couldn’t make himself believe she was acting.

  “So…so this is where he parked,” she said. She wiped her eyes with the back of a trembling hand. “The first time, he pulled in facing the water. Because it was dark, you know, and he needed the headlights. The next time, he backed down.”

  Barrett watched in silence.

  “If he’d gotten the tires any lower, he might’ve gotten stuck,” she said, staring down at the muck beneath the cattails. “But he didn’t. He parked it just right, where he could open the tailgate and we could slide them out and…”

  She lost her words to tears then. The shaking intensified, and she breathed in sharp, fast gasps. He was staring at her, entranced, when she suddenly took another step forward and entered the water.

  At first, he was too surprised to speak. She simply stepped off the shore and into the frigid pond, the water soaking her sandals and rising up on her jeans.

  “Kimberly,” he managed finally, “get out of the water.”

  She gave no indication that she’d heard him. Her pale face was angled toward the north side of the cove—precisely where the raft had been anchored. She was walking right toward it, shaking and crying but showing no reaction to the cold water at all.

  He watched her and remembered what she’d once told him.

  We took him out into the water. Same way, same place. As far as I can wade up to my neck, and I’m five one, and then Mathias swam him out maybe ten feet farther. They’re down there between the raft and the dock. Closer to the raft. You’ll find them there. I don’t know how deep. They aren’t down there very far, though. It’s just dark water, and a lonely place.

  You’ll find them easy.

  “They were right here,” she said. “It’s like I can still see them here. Still feel them, how heavy they were when we went into the water and how light they became the deeper it got.”

  She took two more steps and suddenly the water was up around her shoulders. It got deep fast.

  “Kimberly, get out of the water, damn it!” Barrett snapped, and it was his grandfather’s voice, the one that usually lived only in his head. It got her attention, though. She emerged from the water like something from a myth, as if she belonged to the pond itself. She was shivering, her thin sweatshirt plastered against her small breasts. Fresh tears chased the old ones as she came toward him.

  “They were here,” she said. “I promise you, they were here.”

  He didn’t mean to embrace her. Didn’t even mean to move. But he’d never seen anyone look so utterly broken. He came down off the rock and put his arms around her as her thin body heaved and shuddered against his, and he rubbed his hands across the wet fabric that clung to the small of her back and said, “I believe you, I believe you,” without even pausing to think of the weight of the words.

  She tilted her face up toward him, that pale face with the pug nose and freckles that would always keep her looking girlish, at least until she had a knife in her hand, and said, “Bullshit, Barrett. Nobody does.”

  “That was a stupid thing to do,” he said. “It’s too damn cold to go in the water like that.”

  “It’s what you wanted, right? To bring it all back to me?”

  “No! I just wanted to…”

  “What?” she said. “You just wanted to what?”

  “I wanted to see if you responded to the place.”

  She was trembling against him. The lower edge of her hair was soaked and resting against his arm, the rest still dry. Her tiny, taut body seemed even smaller due to the wet drape of her saturated clothes.

  “Well?” she said. “Did I respond right?” She choked back the tears and said, “His eyes were open, Barrett. His eyes were open and he was trying to breathe. I can’t go back to that island either. I can feel Jackie all around me out there. I can’t take that again, not after being back here.”

  Her shaking intensified, either from the memory or the cold water or both. He put his hand on her shoulder to calm her, and that was when he looked beyond her and saw Liz.

  24

  She was standing halfway down the driveway, in the shadows from the pines, dressed in jeans and a thin fleece and holding a camera. For a moment they were trapped in a silent stare, and then Kimberly Crepeaux, who’d been oblivious, followed his eyes and turned to see Liz. She stepped back quickly.

  “What’s she doing here?” she snapped, shooting Barrett an accusatory stare. “She’s a reporter!”

  “I didn’t call her,” he said.

  “No,” Liz said, stepping to
ward them and speaking to Barrett. “He certainly didn’t.”

  She let that remark hang in the air for a moment before returning her attention to Kimberly.

  “I got a call this morning from someone saying that you two were out at the Port Hope wharf together. I said, There is no way.”

  “I was going to call you today,” Barrett began, and Liz lifted a hand as if to repel the words.

  “I’m sure you were.”

  “No, really. I got in last night, near midnight.”

  Kimberly was looking from one of them to the other, and Barrett saw some understanding flicker in her eyes.

  “It’s my fault,” she said, speaking to Liz. “I kept calling him.”

  Liz didn’t even look at her. “What are you doing, Rob? What in the world are you doing?”

  “Hearing her out. Will you do the same?” He stared hard at her, trying to remind her with eye contact alone of all that lay between them and across the years. “Liz? Please listen to her. Please do that much.”

  For a time there was no sound but the rustle of the pines in the breeze as he and Liz stood there with Kimberly Crepeaux shivering between them.

  “She needs dry clothes,” Liz said at last. “She’ll fit in mine. They’ll be baggy, but she’ll fit in them.”

  “I’ve even got to hem petite jeans,” Kimberly announced. “Can you believe that?”

  Liz stared at her for a few seconds as if trying to comprehend a new species, then looked back at him.

  “I’m sure I’m not the only one getting calls. Somebody else is going to check the tip out soon enough.”

  “We’ll talk to you. She’ll do that.” Barrett nudged Kimberly. “Right?”

  “I guess,” Kimberly said softly. “I guess I’m talking to everybody again. It didn’t do much good last time, though, did it?”

  No one answered that.

  25