by Tessa Wegert
My gaze traveled over the living room. The vintage doorknobs were covered in layers of chipping paint, and there were so many stains on the wall-to-wall carpeting it looked like leopard print. Damn, I thought. It wasn’t the woman who smelled, but the apartment itself.
“It’s nine-fifty a month plus utilities.” She studied me through unblinking eyes, attempting to assess whether I could afford her price. I must have passed the test, because at last she shrugged and said, “If you want it, you better be quick.”
It was the fourth apartment I’d seen today, each more abysmal than the last and all at least forty minutes from work. Rentals in A-Bay, near the State Police station, were rare. This, too, was on account of the season. When I called McIntyre to get her opinion on the slim pickings in Evans Mills, Black River, La Fargeville, she assured me there’d be more on the market come spring. All I could think was too little, too late.
Rooming with Mac felt surprisingly natural, and I believed her when she said she’d love for me to stay, but at our age the arrangement couldn’t be anything but temporary. There would come a day when the sheriff—a perpetual bachelorette married to her job, but smart and attractive—might realize the new guy in the County Clerk’s office was worth a second look. As for me, I might meet someone at the Riverboat Pub and decide to bring him home. It could happen. Post-Carson, the idea of investing any amount of time in a romantic relationship was unthinkable, but seeing Tim with Kelsea made me realize I’d want that again someday. The morning-after breakfast with tousled hair and awkward glances. The lust that preceded it. The trust. For all of that, I’d need a place of my own.
Feeling drained and defeated, I thanked the property manager and left in a hurry. Outside it was getting colder by the minute, and icy water seeped into my boots as I crossed the street to the used SUV I bought after the split. After locking the doors, I took out my phone. The only good thing about being on leave was the ample free time. I’d been using it to mend some fences.
There’s often a lot of self-blame associated with PTSD, and this was definitely true for me. I was freighted with guilt, both over my abduction and my inability to detain Bram when I’d had the chance. My Gil-guided journey to self-awareness had brought up other sources of residual remorse as well, and if I hoped to recover, I figured I should address them. With that in mind, I’d logged onto my long-dormant Facebook account and reconnected with Suzuka Weppler.
I met my former best friend through a sixth-grade activity I’d been roped into by my art teacher. Suze was new to the school, having moved up from D.C., so for her, the pressure to participate came from her parents. For three weekends and a half dozen after-school sessions, Suze and I worked with a few other students painting colorful murals on the hallway walls of Swanton’s combined middle and high school. Suze’s outlook on the project was similar to mine—anything to get out of team sports—and it didn’t take long for us to gel. Far as I know, our mural of Lake Champlain’s legendary sea monster is still right where we left it.
Our friendship wasn’t as enduring, and I thought of our time together with a mixture of fondness and shame. Suze was deep into her wild phase before the end of eighth grade, barely fourteen when she started ditching school and shoplifting in the village. That was also the year she began dabbling in soft drugs. Many a night I’d followed her into the woods to a bonfire party, the clearing filled with salvaged furniture, old mattresses, and—as the night wore on—empty beer cans. Led Zeppelin and Jamiroquai blasted on a portable CD boom box, kids chanted along with the Beastie Boys and Fatboy Slim, bits of ash spiraled up into the stripes of navy sky between the trees, and all the while Suze tried to indoctrinate me into her wayward ways.
I did some things I’m not proud of at those parties, while Suze sat on some randy boy’s lap and cheered me on. Overall, I managed to keep my head, but the same couldn’t be said of my friend. By freshman year of high school, the rumors circulating the cafeteria were cutting: Suze was in a threesome. Suze once did a guy in his thirties. Suze can get you hash, mushrooms, whatever you want. In our small community people often got restless, and drugs were a common distraction, but Suze’s behavior grew increasingly dangerous. I was afraid she’d drag me down with her. Scared of getting hurt. After graduation, when I left for Albany and a career in law enforcement, Suze and the vestiges of our friendship stayed behind.
Over the years, my parents had briefed me on her life—her marriage, the birth of her daughter, the death of her dad. That news was a gut-punch. Mike Weppler was the best: funny and understanding even when his daughter went off the rails. He started teaching at the high school around the time my father took a job with the Board of Ed. Even the most jaded of students had liked Mr. Weppler. I’d sent a card, of course, but that was the extent of our contact. After fifteen years pretty much incommunicado, I’d reached out to my old friend with no illusions that she’d write back. Now, my mobile showed a new message waiting.
Suze’s note was equal parts emojis and exclamation points. If she was upset that I hadn’t approached her sooner, she didn’t show it. Of course, the neglect went both ways. She gave me a rundown of her life before turning the mic over to me. I drew the map of my own recent past in cursory strokes: college, police academy, NYPD, Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Upstate New York. I opted not to mention the abduction and failed fiancé, though they’d probably interest her most of all.
As I typed my reply, I had the overwhelming sense that I was being watched. Pedestrians jogged along the sidewalk, shoulders shrugged against the rain. There were a half dozen men within a few yards of my car, their faces concealed by umbrellas and scarves. None gave me so much as a once-over.
I dropped my eyes to the screen.
It wasn’t the knowledge Bram could be nearby that had me spooked this time, but what reconnecting with Suze was going to do to me. My past was treacherous, a quagmire of emotional states; step into it, and I risked sinking up to my neck. With the exception of my parents, I’d deliberately avoided all citizens of Swanton. The idea of conversing with a local outside my immediate family made my palms sweat. Everyone in town knew our history, and like the flashbacks I’d experienced about the East Village, talk of my mother’s relatives sent me into a panic. If someone brought up the Skiltons—my aunt, uncle, or cousins—I wasn’t sure I could control my nervous system. I’d probably hurl on their shoes.
Suze didn’t mention my extended family in her Facebook message, and if I could keep our conversations surface-level, I might be okay. I hit send on a comparably cheerful response, stuck my phone back in my bag, and turned my thoughts toward lunch.
No sooner had I started the car than the ringer sounded on my phone. Mom’s call the previous night had come as a surprise; seeing her name on the display again now left me dumbfounded. I’d been sitting in the cold SUV for fifteen minutes—what I wouldn’t give for Gil’s warm layers now—so while I loathed an idling engine, I turned it on and cranked the heat as I answered.
“We have you on speaker,” my mother said. “Can you hear us?”
“Hi, love.” My father’s voice was strangely flat.
“Dad? You’re not at work?”
“Ah,” he said. “The school board insisted I take some personal days.”
“Personal days?” I repeated, bewildered. “What for? What’s going on? You guys are scaring me.”
There was a beat of silence before Mom spoke. “I’m not sure how to tell you this, hon. They’ve got it wrong, obviously. After all these years . . . and he left! It can’t be him.”
“Della,” Dad said with uncharacteristic anger. I heard him sigh, a sound rife with frustration and regret. “The bones they found,” he said. “That body. It’s Brett.”
The fans on my dashboard wrapped me in a dry heat, but I found I was shivering, my body tense and twitchy. I shut off the engine, plunging the car into silence. “What?”
“Brett,” said my
father. “He’s . . . well, he’s dead, darling. It seems he has been for a long time, they think about twenty years. Your aunt got the call this morning. She told your mum.”
“But they’re wrong,” said Mom matter-of-factly. “The timing’s all wrong.”
“I don’t understand.” Uncle Brett, married to my mother’s sister, was a ghost long before today. As a kid I rarely saw him, though his name came up a lot, usually in the context of behavior my parents tried and failed to sanitize for the sake of my brother and me. Brett ran into some trouble with a fellow at work. Brett was misbehaving at the Franklin county fair. Not long after he and Aunt Fee split up, Brett left Swanton and never returned. Dad had said his remains could be twenty years old. That took us to the late nineties. I would have been barely thirteen.
“They’ll be doing some DNA testing to confirm it,” he said, “but they found a pocketknife nearby. It was terribly rusted, but engraved with his first name. Felicia says she gave that knife to Brett on his twenty-fifth birthday, and that he never went anywhere without it. It could be that someone stole it, but since Brett’s been gone as long as he has, and nobody’s heard from him in years, well. There’s a good chance it’s him.”
I shook my head and tried to make sense of what I was hearing. “But Mom’s right,” I said. “Brett left Swanton in the nineties. He moved away. Didn’t he move away?”
“Well, that’s a bit tricky.”
“There’s nothing tricky about it. He did move away,” said Mom. “Snuck off like a thief in the night and abandoned his family for Philadelphia. You remember—Brett quit his job, told Felicia he was leaving, and was gone within forty-eight hours. He said he’d send money when he could, though of course he never did. So you see, Brett couldn’t have died twenty years ago. He was in Pennsylvania.”
“Here’s the trouble with that,” said Dad. “The police did some digging, and apparently when Brett buggered off, he positively vanished. They found no current ID, no tax returns. I don’t believe your aunt’s heard a peep from him since.”
“So the last time you actually saw Brett was . . .”
“1998,” said Dad.
“Late June,” added Mom.
I tapped my finger against my forehead. No doubt someone was performing an autopsy on what was left of Brett’s body, but if forensics had already called the crime two decades old, they must have been confident in their preliminary analysis. It was all so strange. “How did he die?” I asked. “Do they know?”
“That’s just it,” said my dad, and when he paused I heard Mom’s breath catch in her throat. “They think he was murdered, love.”
Hearing my father blurt that word in his chipper English accent hit me like a high-voltage jolt. I’d been sitting upright for the duration of the call, my spine hard as a crowbar, and when I leaned back against the driver’s seat, my back spasmed painfully. I felt like I’d woken up to discover a nightmare I was desperate to escape was real. I thought of the message I’d sent to Suze minutes ago, my petty worry she’d bring up my family. Word of Brett Skilton’s murder was about to descend on Swanton like a cold front, inexorable in its force. Before long we’d all be in the local news, rolling off a two-decade hiatus with a tale more sordid and sensational than ever before. A tectonic shift was taking place in our family, separating the then from the now.
A truck rumbled down the street and splashed my car with slop. The brown water on my windshield roused me from my trance. “Does Doug know?”
“We just told him,” Dad said. “He insists on coming, but he can’t get here for a couple of days.”
So my brother was going to Swanton to see my folks through this tragedy. He lived just forty minutes away, and he was their eldest child, but this bulletin didn’t sit right with me. I was the one who dealt in death and delinquents. If anyone was going to hold their hands through this awful experience, shouldn’t it be me?
“There’s absolutely no need for Doug to come,” said Mom. “If the police have questions, we can handle them ourselves.”
Her veiled uneasiness only served to strengthen my resolve. I couldn’t leave my parents to deal with a brutal discovery like this while I sat at Mac’s pretending everything was fine.
I glanced at my watch and calculated the time it would take to pick up my overnight bag and shoot Mac a text letting her know about my plans.
“I’ll be there in three hours,” I said as I restarted the engine. “What’s for dinner?”
SIX
A potluck gathering on the shores of Lake Champlain, where Felicia screamed at Brett across the picnic table.
Brett missing for days at a time while my aunt slammed cupboard doors in the kitchen.
Crissy flipping him the bird when he decided to play the responsible father and impose a curfew.
These visions plagued me as I made the familiar drive north along the St. Lawrence River, then east toward Swanton, Vermont.
When I thought about my uncle, it was mainly with indifference. Before he and Felicia separated, he sometimes brought us treats at odd hours, doling out warm cherry Cokes to the kids while he cracked open a beer from his ice-cold six-pack. He was also the dad who on more than one occasion had slept fully clothed on the porch swing, and who never missed a chance to chat up Crissy’s friends. Wading through my memories of him was a slog, but I did recall snatches of the summer of 1998. Had I known it would lead to murder, I’d have paid more attention.
Despite my apathetic feelings toward Uncle Brett, the news of his demise made me feel ill. My cousins thought he’d abandoned them, and that was bad enough; the idea that Brett could have been in Swanton all along was torture. Decomposition is never pretty, but a death in the woods meant Brett’s body had been picked apart by scavengers and insects. Exposed to the elements, his flesh would have burst open to purge its fluids in its haste to devolve into cartilage and bone. Nobody deserved to live with an image of their dad like that.
As I drove, sipping my afternoon coffee from a to-go cup, I evaluated what I knew so far. If the local forensic analyst was right about the age of the bones, Brett must have been killed shortly after he announced he was leaving Swanton. My mother’s confusion about the timeline was understandable. We’d all believed Brett left of his own volition, no longer willing or able to deal with his estranged wife. The realization that he’d been in town all along, rotting in the Missisquoi Refuge just a few miles from our house, was incomprehensible.
The big question, of course, was who put him there.
* * *
* * *
Some towns announce themselves with fanfare, a gilded WELCOME sign boasting the date they were established. Sometimes there’s even a slogan—gateway to this, home of the that. Swanton trickled into view like a rivulet of rainwater after a storm. A hodgepodge of bungalows and farmhouses came first, some with three different types of siding, others showing century-old colors through fissures of peeling paint. Weeks past Halloween, ghosts fashioned from white sheeting still hung on bare bushes, yet two houses already paraded inflatable Santas, one dressed in camo, the other riding a Harley. The farm equipment retailer, the maple candy store, the coin wash and pizza parlor behind dunes of grass gone brown . . . they were all right where I left them. This was no spit-and-polish New England village leaking charm from every orifice, but it was mine.
I rolled into the driveway of my childhood home when the sun hung low in the pale orange sky. The place was a manor by Swanton standards, a fifties-era colonial on a double lot. There was a Thanksgiving wreath strapped to the door, retrieved from a basement storage box where I knew it resided with its Christmas, Valentine’s Day, Easter, and Halloween counterparts. Dad’s car, freshly washed, sparkled in the asphalt driveway, which the hose had patterned in wavy fingers of ice.
They’d been busy, my parents. The innate need to distract themselves from the startling news of Brett’s death was apparent in the meal
they cooked as well. I’d given them little notice about my decision to visit, but they’d prepared a big Sunday dinner of lasagna in a creamy white sauce with Dad’s famous Arctic roll, the sponge cake homemade, for dessert. When I looked at my parents and the feast they’d made so lovingly spread out before us, I felt my heart swell.
That joyful feeling was fleeting.
I inherited my father’s face, triangular in shape with full cheeks and a nose as perky as a comic strip character’s. Mom’s looks had always struck me as more feminine than my own, but now the high cheekbones and delicate lips I’d coveted gave her a skeletal appearance that troubled me to my core. Dad didn’t seem to be faring much better. Overall, his head—huge for his body and covered in bushy hair—looked whiter than usual. At some point he’d put on a paint-stained shirt to wash the car, and he hadn’t bothered to change for dinner. There was a beleaguered ennui to their collective mood that went beyond standard-issue sadness.
“This is good, Mom,” I said, reaching for a second helping. It was Carson who’d done the food prep in our relationship, and prior to that I’d lived on station pastries and white-bread PB&Js. My mother’s home-cooked meals were the stuff of my dreams.
She smiled at me as I ate. “How’s Tim?”
“He’s fine. I bumped into him yesterday, actually.” Though they had yet to meet him in person, my parents loved Tim. They conflated him with my survival on Tern Island, which was fine by me because that drew their attention away from the debacle with Carson. As I’d alluded to Gil, my parents weren’t fans of my job. While they supported my decision to leave my fiancé, especially after learning how he’d manipulated my state of weakness, I knew they’d been hoping he could talk me out of my senior investigator gig in A-Bay. Who could blame them? Within months of arriving in Upstate New York I’d been isolated on an island with a killer, had been attacked by a murder suspect, and had nearly drowned. Mom liked to joke she had to visit the hair salon weekly, so persistent was the gray I caused.
