Sins of the Father (Book 2, The Erin Solomon Mysteries)

by Jen Blood

  Once I’d gotten the gravel out of my knee and wrestled my hair into the requisite ponytail, I returned to the office to find Diggs deep in conversation with an unnervingly tall brunette seated on the edge of his desk. A quick flash of what looked a lot like guilt crossed his face when I came in; my stomach bottomed out in that way it does when you get bad news or eat bad clams. Einstein was curled up on the couch glowering at the stranger, which made me feel only marginally better.

  “Sol, this is Andie. She just took over the Lifestyle section here.” He made no effort to tell Andie who I was. I took a step toward her and extended my hand.

  “Erin Solomon,” I said.

  “Oh, I know,” Andie said. She had curves that I lacked and a brighter smile and she was still sitting on Diggs’ desk. I managed to suppress the urge to push her off, but just barely. “I’ve heard all about you, trust me.” The way she said it made me think those stories hadn’t been entirely flattering. “You left out how cute she is though, Diggs.”

  I flashed a brilliant smile. “Yeah, he always forgets that part.”

  She removed her shapely ass from Diggs’ desk and casually brushed her hand against his shoulder, leaning in just a touch. “Well, I’ll leave you to it. We still on for lunch?”

  “Yeah, definitely,” Diggs said. “I’ll catch up with you later.” He was doing his best to avoid eye contact with either one of us. Andie sashayed out the door. I fired up my laptop and settled in beside Einstein, who thumped his tail uneasily.

  “She’s new,” Diggs said, after I’d frozen him out for a good five minutes.

  “You don’t say.” I pulled up a page on the Gendreau murder and began reading.

  “She’s nice,” he continued. “I think you two will hit it off.”

  “Super.” I kept my eyes on the computer screen. “How long would you say the drive to Quebec is from here?”

  “You’re pissed.”

  Damn skippy I was pissed. I leaned into the feeling for just a second before I pulled back and got myself in hand. Diggs and I had been friends for years—I’d learned a long time ago that that was the best we could hope for. So he’d suggested a few months back that he might be interested in something more; it wasn’t like he’d declared his undying love. And I was the one who took off, not him. So now… Well, now I was going to focus on work. Chase down leads. Find my father. All anything else amounted to were distractions I didn’t need.

  After another five seconds of silence, I almost bought it.

  I met his eye. “It’s fine, Diggs. I didn’t call—it’s not like I expected you to sit around and wait for me to come back.”

  “I just thought you and Juarez…”

  I waved off the explanation. “Yeah, I know—I told you, no big deal. We’re good. Now, what’d you find out from your contacts up north?”

  He wasn’t buying the act, but at least he did me the courtesy of going along with it. “I’m just waiting for a return call, then I’ve got a few more things to check out. Maybe we can go over everything a little later. What time’s your thing with the lawyer?”

  I checked my watch. “Actually, I should probably get going now.” It was ten minutes ‘til ten; my appointment wasn’t until one. I packed up my stuff, grabbed Einstein, and took off before I had to face Amazon Andie again.

  Since it was once again way too hot for any good dog to be car-bound, I left Einstein with Maya—who assured me that she and Kat would treat him like the grandson they’d never had until I returned. I left town and headed back up Route 1 into Rockport, where I swam a few laps at Walker Park and tried to clear my head. The mercury was pushing ninety that day, the park filled to the brim with trendy moms corralling trendy toddlers on the playground. I chose a picnic table as far from the action as possible, managed to tap into someone else’s Wifi from one of the neighboring houses, and got my head back in the game.

  At a little before one, I changed into something moderately respectable and drove the five minutes it took to get from the park to the offices of Max Richards & Sons, just over the Rockport bridge. I double checked the address I’d been given when I ended up at a huge old Victorian place badly in need of paint. Or possibly demolition. A six-foot privacy fence surrounded the perimeter. The front steps sagged, the yard was overgrown, and when I knocked it sounded like the hounds of hell were about to burst through the front door to devour me.

  After some colorful language on the other side of the door, a thin, sixty-ish woman wearing a frayed housedress finally opened up. A pack of dogs ranging from ten pounds to two hundred surged toward me until the woman hissed a few more choice epithets in what sounded like French. The lot of them slunk backwards, tails low, as I crossed the threshold. The place smelled like wet dog, spoiled food, and old coffee grinds. Shredded newspapers and old books littered the entryway. Whoever this woman was, housekeeping clearly was not her forte.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I think I must have the wrong place. I’m looking for Max Richards?”

  She stared at me like I’d just dropped from the sky. I persevered. “I think his office must be around here—it’s a law office. Max Richards and Sons?”

  The woman pointed behind her. “He’s waiting for you. Down the hall and up the stairs. Troisieme etage. Third floor.” It took me a minute to place her accent, a kind of Downeast-Meets-Cajun-N’Orleans common to the Acadian contingent in northern Maine.

  One of the dogs dared to slink forward to sniff my hand. I scratched his ears and the woman smiled, revealing grey teeth and a badly receding gumline. Despite the smile, she was still staring at me like my head was on fire.

  “Il s’appelle Midget,” she said. Midget was the two-hundred pounder, a cross between a Newfie and a grizzly bear. The other dogs crept forward at my attention. “Allez—Go. I can only hold them so long.”

  I went.

  Once I’d reached the top of the third flight, past peeling wallpaper and sagging steps and air so warm and so damp I felt like I was trapped at the bottom of an old gym sock, I found a long, dark hallway with a dim light burning. Classical music played behind a door to my left. I knocked, and was met with an eardrum-piercing shriek and what sounded like a bookshelf falling. Five minutes passed before a white-haired man with glasses opened the door just a crack. It was all very Dickensian.

  “Erin? Come on in—nice to meet you. Mind the bird.”

  I ventured inside the cramped space where there was, indeed, a balding white cockatiel perched on a branch in the corner. An orange, one-eyed tomcat sat in the windowsill, tail twitching. An oscillating fan blew hot air around the room.

  “You’re Max Richards?”

  “In the flesh,” he assured me. He moved a pile of newspapers from a rickety chair with threadbare upholstering and motioned for me to sit.

  “Sorry for the mess. You met Bonnie?”

  “Your… Uh, the woman, downstairs?”

  He nodded, smiling. “She’s an odd one. Nice enough, but she’s not much for order. I hired a cleaning lady once—lost her, though.”

  Whether she’d quit or just been misplaced in the clutter was unclear. Max took a seat behind his desk, where the paperwork was piled so high I could only see the top of his glasses and his balding head.

  “Hank wasn’t sure you’d be by or not,” he said.

  “I figured I’d at least look into things. He told me to check in with you about the case files.”

  He hauled a box out from under his desk and nudged it toward me with his foot, then repeated the procedure with three more.

  “Seriously?”

  “You asked,” he said. “This is everything: notes, transcripts, photos, press clippings…”

  I mopped the sweat from my forehead with the back of my hand. “So you really don’t think he did it?”

  “Not a chance,” he said without hesitation. He wasn’t quite so Dickensian once I got a better look at him—or if he was, he was closer to Skimpole than Micawber. Though he was probably in his sixties, it wasn’t a f
rail sixty and he moved with surprising agility. He wore a tweed sport coat and dress slacks, his only concession to the heat a notable lack of footwear and an unknotted plaid tie. He seemed sincere enough, but I didn’t take that too seriously. He was a lawyer, after all.

  “What about the confession?” I asked.

  “Read the transcripts and the notes the police kept,” he said. “You’ll see erasure marks from the arresting officers right there—they altered the original documents. He loved Ashley. Besides which, he has no history of mental illness; it’s true he was no choirboy in his youth, but there was nothing in his past to indicate something like this. There’s no doubt in my mind that he didn’t do it.”

  I opened the first box and peered inside to find three bound volumes of court testimony and a bunch of photos.

  “This may take a while,” I said.

  “Take your time.” He stood and put an expert Windsor knot in his tie without so much as a glance in the mirror. “I have meetings in Augusta this afternoon, but I’ll be back when I’m through. You think you may still be here?”

  “You could have meetings in Johannesburg and I’m pretty sure I’d still be here.”

  He chuckled. “Well, it’s just the capitol for me today, so I expect we’ll see each other before you go. Watch Spartacus doesn’t get too close. He can be ornery.”

  He left before I could ask whether Spartacus was the bird or the cat. Neither of them looked that friendly. I listened to Max whistle his way down the stairwell, then once I was sure he was gone, I carried two of the boxes to a worn duvet at one side of the office and set to work.

  Ashley Gendreau had just turned seventeen when she was killed, on a hot July day in a small northern town called Black Falls, population 6,093. The same Black Falls, presumably, where Hank Gendreau and my father met, according to his story. On the day she disappeared, Ashley had been in the house watching her younger sister, who was two at the time. Mrs. Gendreau—their mother—got home at four that afternoon to find Ashley’s shoes by the door and her backpack still on the couch. The sister was asleep in her room.

  Ashley, however, was gone. The transcripts from the original trial in 1988 were yellowed and worn inside their black binders. I paused at a section in the first trial transcripts, when Ashley’s mother—Hank’s ex-wife, Glenda Gendreau—had been questioned.

  Q. Was your husband home when you returned that afternoon?

  A. No. Nobody was there but Chloe—the baby.

  Q. Did it seem strange to you that Hank was gone?

  A. No. He said he was going out in the woods for a couple days. I knew he wouldn’t be back. Didn’t give it a second thought.

  Q. Did he say what he would be doing in the woods?

  A. Hank likes to go out there whenever he gets the chance, just to be with nature—sometimes he’ll go out hunting, but most times he just likes to hike around.

  Q. Were you aware of his drug use?

  A. I knew he’d done some stuff in high school—it was the ‘70s. Everybody did that kind of thing.

  Q. Did you know he had LSD that he intended to take that day?

  A. No. I didn’t think he did that stuff anymore.

  Q. Prior to July 12, are you aware of the last time that your husband took LSD?

  A. I’m not sure. You’d have to ask him.

  Q. Can you tell the court what happened on November 2nd, 1973?

  A. I don’t know. That was a long time ago.

  Q. I’ll refresh your memory. On the evening of November 2nd, 1973, you contacted the Black Falls sheriff’s department. Can you tell the court why you made that call?

  What followed from there was a long, drawn-out account of a fall night in 1973 when Hank Gendreau dropped acid, had a bad trip, and wound up naked and fetal on the porch of his girlfriend’s parents’ house. He was twenty at the time; Ashley was three, and Ashley’s mother—Glenda—was a whopping seventeen years old, still living at home with her parents while she and Hank saved to get their own place. A bad trip was hardly unheard of for college kids in those days, but Hank Gendreau wasn’t a college kid, he was a deadbeat twenty-year-old who’d already knocked up a thirteen-year-old girl back when he was in high school. Not exactly the kind of guy who inspired a lot of faith in your average, God-fearing jury. When you looked at that in conjunction with the events of the day Ashley Gendreau had been killed, it established a history of drug use and what the prosecuting attorney called “deviant behavior.” Hank’s defense had taken a bad hit that day, and things had gone downhill from there.

  The only chink in the State’s case was an alternate suspect in the area at around the time of the murder, but the judge had ruled the evidence inadmissible before the jury ever heard about it. I read through appeals filed and news articles written on one Will Rainier, a convicted sex offender and one of Hank’s best friends. I thought of the photo Hank had shown me: Jeff, Will & Hank. Though I didn’t know for sure, it seemed safe to assume that the man in the photo was Will Rainier. If this Jeff kid really had been my father once upon a time, he had epically shitty taste in BFF’s.

  Will’s alibi—a fishing trip with his father and brothers the day Ashley was killed—seemed weak to me, but apparently the judge didn’t agree. Will Rainier was written off and the case moved forward without him.

  I took a break about an hour in because I was about to either burst into flames or melt from the heat. The pack descended the second my feet hit the first floor, Bonnie close behind. She opened the front door and the lot of them fled for the yard.

  “You look mal,” she said. “Come in the kitchen. I’ll get you something cold.”

  I nodded gratefully. The kitchen was no cleaner than the rest of the house, but an ancient air conditioner roared in the window, making the temperature at least twenty degrees cooler than it had been in Max’s office. Bonnie fixed me a glass of iced tea and set a plate of very stale looking Oreos in the middle of the table.

  “You are investigating Hank, non?” she asked before I’d even had a chance to sample the iced tea.

  “I’m looking into his daughter’s murder, yes—Or at least that’s the plan. I’m not sure what I can do, though.”

  “Arien, maintenant.”

  I looked at her in surprise. My French was virtually nonexistent, but her tone came across loud and clear.

  “Nothing,” she said. “It is better to leave it.”

  She sat in a torn vinyl kitchen chair across from me and pushed the hair out of her face. Her eyes were deep-set and brown, the lashes long and dark—the kind of eyes that could make an otherwise unremarkable face stand out in a crowd. Despite a little lax hygiene now, I suspected she’d been a real beauty in her day.

  “So you know Hank, then?” I asked.

  “Oui,” she said briefly.

  “What do you think of his story?”

  “The day Ashley died?”

  I nodded. “From what I can tell, there are quite a few people out there who think he didn’t do it.”

  “C’est vrai. Red Grivois arrested him that day, but he never did believe Hank was the one.”

  I jotted down the name. “Hank said something about DNA evidence—do you know where that’s kept at this point?”

  “In Augusta—with the State. It was in a drawer here for a long time. They don’t let us do that no more.” She took a long, slow sip of iced tea before she spoke again. “Did Hank tell you about that day?”

  I set my tea back down. Health code-wise, I figured Bonnie’s kitchen was just a step above eating from a dumpster in Bangkok, so I avoided the cookies. I shook my head.

  “I haven’t gotten to his testimony yet,” I said. “And we didn’t have that much time to talk when I met with him the other day. Has he talked to you about it?”

  It looked like she was about to say something important, but she changed tacks at the last second. “Your name—what is it, s’il vous plez?”

  “Erin,” I said. “Erin Solomon.”

  She nodded, never taki
ng her eyes off me. “How did Hank find you?”

  “I’m a reporter—he read a story I’d written, and asked me to look into this. I thought it sounded interesting. Can we get back to what you were saying a minute ago, about what Hank saw the day his daughter was killed…?”

  She stood abruptly. “It was a bad day.”

  I’m no Sam Spade, but I’d managed to put that much together on my own. I waited for her to elaborate. She didn’t. Instead, she took the still-full platter of stale cookies off the table and headed for the sink.

  “How do you know Hank, exactly?” I asked.

  She set the platter on the counter and started the water running in the sink. Between that and the air conditioner, it was hard to hear her when she finally spoke.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I didn’t catch that.”

  She turned around and fixed me with that Hellraiser stare of hers again. “Don’t worry about Hank. He won’t hurt nobody.” She stopped. Despite the fact that her eyes were drilling holes clear through me, I got the sense she wasn’t seeing me at all. Then, suddenly there was a shift. She softened, and her eyes found mine. “It’s G. you watch for, oui? Because G. will be watching for you.”

  A damp, icy chill climbed my spine. “Excuse me? Who’s G?”

  “Il est un diable,” she said. “The devil, oui? He comes out at night. Pis when I’m in the garden. He waits for me in my dreams. The world grows cold, and then, voila. Il est la.”

  “I’m sorry—I don’t think I’m following you. Who are we talking about?”

  “I don’t know him—I only see him. Not see him avec mes yeux,” she laughed dryly, gesturing to her eyes. “I know he isn’t there. Not truly.”

  Somehow, that wasn’t a lot of comfort. She continued without another prompt from me.

  “When he sees you, that’s when he is le diable. Even when he doesn’t want to be no more, oui? Il ne peut pas arrêter.” She closed her eyes. Her voice lowered to a whisper. “When he smells blood sous le rouge blanc pis bleu—il est fait. He is done. His eyes find yours, pis maintenant il a besoin de vous. You run. And don’t stop.”