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CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT

“Give me the keys,” I tell Marty.

“What?”

“Just give them to me, please.”

“But you’re a terrible driver. And you’re recovering from a bullet wound.”

My hand is out, palm up. He reluctantly drops the keys into it. I get in the driver’s side. He takes the passenger seat.

“What happened?” Marty asks. “What did she say?”

I shake him off. Not now. It’s not time to talk it out yet.

I can’t drive away from Farnwood fast enough. It is almost as though the ghosts are chasing me away. I am trying to process what I learned. Judith could be lying, of course. She is manipulative and vindictive, but the thing is, she is also highly self-interested. There is a method to her madness usually, and making up this story just to… I don’t know… make it harder for me to figure out the case or to toy with me doesn’t seem enough. She is cruel enough, of course, but for her, cruelty serves a purpose.

Her accusation also has the ring of truth.

I don’t bother calling ahead. I just find myself reaching another stupid rich-people’s gate in front of the driveway. I give my name to the guard. It’s someone who wasn’t here last time I was, so he’s looking at me and my crappy car like I just dropped dog feces on their lawn. That infuriates me. Bad enough when the rich look down upon you, but why are the people they hire—people no wealthier than you—even worse? Like they’re snobby by proxy. That infuriates me too. Everything infuriates me. The stupid gate, as I wait for the guard to call up to the house, infuriates me. I want to hit the accelerator and crash through it.

“Marty?”

“What?”

“Do you mind staying down here?”

“Seriously?”

I look at him. He sighs and gets out as the guard finally opens the stupid gate. I drive up to the house, but as I do, as I get closer, I slow my roll.

Their daughter is dead.

It might even be my fault.

Probably was. No matter how you sliced it. If the bullet was meant for me, well, that’s the obvious way. But if it wasn’t, if my investigation had somehow awakened the past, then it is still on me.

Perhaps that explains my fury. I’m redirecting it. I’m not furious with the gate. I am furious with myself. As I see the house rise before me, I flash back to when I first trudged through those woods in search of Anna Marigold, the old ghost from my past, and since that first day, I’ve had so many theories swirling in my head, so many attempts at trying to figure out the truth, that I’ve come to realize that the only thing I know is that I can’t trust anyone or anything. I am not a paranoid sort, and that’s not what I’m feeling now, but this is akin to paranoia, I guess, a feeling that reality is perhaps conspiring against clarity.

Archie and Talia are both at the door when I arrive, standing side by side. When I park, Archie steps in front of his wife as though offering protection and says, “I told you this was over.”

“I know,” I say, as I move toward them, pointing my chin toward Talia, “but she told me to stay on it.”

Archie turns to his wife with surprise. “Talia?”

“Someone took her from us,” she says.

“The police are investigating—”

“I’m not talking about now. I’m talking about then. It changed the course of her life. Don’t you see? If she wasn’t kidnapped, her life would have been completely different. She would have never met Kierce. She wouldn’t have been in the park with him. She’d be alive.”

“Talia—”

“I don’t want to let this go,” she pleads. “I want to know what happened to our daughter that night when she left the party. Don’t you? Archie? Please, don’t we need to know? Both of us?”

He opens his mouth, but for a few moments no words come out. “I thought we put it behind us,” he says, “the day she came home.”

She shakes her head. “You put it behind you.”

“And you?”

“I tried to ignore it. Like I jammed it into a box in the back of my closet. But our daughter is dead now. And I need those answers.” Talia Belmond doesn’t wait for him to say more. “Have you learned something new?”

“I need to talk to you,” I say to her. “Alone.”

“No,” she says.

“Mrs. Belmond—”

“Talia,” she says, correcting me. “And you can say whatever you need to with Archie here.”

“I was just with Judith Burkett,” I say. “I think it is better if we talk alone.”

But even as I say it, I can tell that won’t be necessary. Their faces say it all. They both know. They both know what Judith Burkett told me. Without conscious thought, or so it seems, they take each other’s hand. I can’t say who initiated it or if they both just moved at the same time. But there they are, standing together, ready to face me as one.

“It’s not better alone,” Talia says.

They stand there, steadying themselves as though they are standing on the beach awaiting a wave that they know will sweep them away. I flash back to Anna’s last request that I protect them, and I want to tell her that I don’t know how.

“Judith told you why I went to Chicago,” Talia says.

Again I’ve learned to use silence. I simply nod.

Archie says, “I don’t see the relevance. How long have you been married?”

“Not quite a year.”

“You’ll have ups and you’ll have downs. Our youngest child was about to leave home for college. Empty nest syndrome. We didn’t tell Thomas or Victoria, but we had decided on a trial separation. It wasn’t for us—we realized that pretty fast. In the end I think it made our marriage stronger.”

Did it? I wonder. I don’t say this out loud.

“I didn’t go through with it,” Talia says. “I might have. I was still in the lobby, almost five in the morning, trying to work up the courage to go to his room. I kept crying. And suddenly Archie was there. He wasn’t supposed to come. He was supposed to stay home. But, I don’t know, maybe he sensed something. Either way he stopped me from making a huge mistake. His arrival felt like a blessing, like we’d been saved.”

I see Archie shut his eyes as she speaks as though warding off blows.

“We talked that whole next day. And the day after. We saw that we were both still in love with one another. We saved our marriage and came home in the best place we’d been in in years.”

And, I think to myself, you took your eye off the ball. Again, no need to say it. They know. It explains a lot about their guilt. It explains why they didn’t see the warning signs when their daughter didn’t contact them. Protect them , Victoria had asked, and so I won’t point out that their neglect had probably contributed to what had happened. I suspect they had already pointed it out to themselves every morning for eleven long, hard torturous years. What pain. What horror. I wonder what it must have been like to live with that kind of guilt for those eleven years, and again I think I’m starting to understand why Anna—I notice I’m going back and forth on what to call her—wanted me to protect them.

“I’m sorry to bring this up,” I say.

“It has nothing to do with what happened to Victoria,” Talia says a little too firmly. “It helped make us what we are today.”

Which is what? I ask myself. I believe what Victoria told me. That they were happy. That they are good, decent people. But I think about it from another perspective too. Their marriage suffers a rupture. They claim that they fixed it in Chicago and maybe they did, but then the aftermath—their daughter’s disappearance—had to change everything. Was the renewed marital bond based on the idea that they still loved one another—or was the bond forged in tragedy?

And does it matter?

I try to put it together. New Year’s Eve 1999. Talia goes to Chicago to meet a man. Victoria leaves her party in New York City. Are they connected? Add in that Thomas drives Victoria to McCabe’s Pub and then heads home to sulk. And then there’s Archie, who stays behind because he was worried about Y2K—but ends up in Chicago blocking his wife’s possible cheating rendezvous.

Something isn’t adding up.

“Who was the man?”

“It doesn’t matter,” Archie says.

“It doesn’t,” Talia adds. “He was a college boyfriend named Steven Ricci. He moved to Miami. He died four years ago.”

I look at Archie. “You were supposed to stay home that night,” I say. “Because of Y2K worries.”

“Yes.”

“Yet you ended up taking a private flight there at, what, three, four in the morning.”

“Earlier,” he says quickly. Too quickly. And something starts niggling at the base of my skull.

“Why?”

“I told you. I stayed around in case there was any danger from Y2K. Once that danger had passed, I decided to join Talia.”

I stand there and let the moment weigh on us. We all feel it. Something isn’t adding up.

“Did you know Talia was meeting Ricci?”

He swallows hard. “No,” he says. “I had no idea.”

“It must have been devastating.”

He lowers his head. Talia steps forward.

“Forget what I said before,” she tells me. “Leave us alone.”

“Do you want to fill me in?” Marty asks.

“Not yet.”

Marty shifts the car into drive. “Back home then?”

“Can we make a stop first?”

“Where?”

“The cemetery.”

“The one you were just at?”

“Yep.”

Marty seems puzzled by the request, but he honors it.

The cemetery is a mile away from the Belmonds’ estate. Marty parks and I tell him to wait, that I won’t be long. I get out. The car door echoes when I close it. I weave my way through the tombstones until I find the freshly repacked earth. I didn’t have a chance to do this at the funeral. It wasn’t my place, what with the family asking for and getting privacy. There have been no obituaries in the paper. The funeral arrangements were kept confidential. Her murder was a news story, of course, but not as big a one as you might imagine. The world is so easily distracted by shiny new stories. We are in a constant whirlwind of scroll. Everything is a blur. Nothing is worthy of our attention for more than a day, two at the most anymore, and if the Belmond family doesn’t feed the story—if nothing new happens—it will vanish from that scroll.

But I don’t want that for her.

I don’t mean in terms of the public. I don’t care about that, and I suspect Victoria would relish the privacy. I mean in terms of me. Her death means something to me. She meant something to me. It might not have been true love, like with Molly, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t something special and unique. We connected. You might think what she did to me in Spain was unforgivable or you might think she was a victim of horrible circumstances or you might land in the middle. I don’t care about any of that. Right now, I am thinking about that first dance in Spain and twenty-two years later, being with her when she gasped her final breath in New York City. So I want to acknowledge all that. That she mattered to me too. I want to pay my respects. I want to do right by her.

By us.

So I sit on the grass next to the freshly packed dirt. I reach out and put my hand on top of where her remains lie. I am sorting through it all, for her sake, and I realize that everyone connected to this is lying to me. I don’t know why yet. But I’m not fully buying the story about why Archie Belmond ended up in Chicago. I think about the Belmonds, all of them, and I think about how the trajectory of their lives changed that New Year’s Eve, and somehow, I don’t think it’s only because of the obvious.

A theory is starting to form. It’s an ugly one. But my mind can’t help but go there. I remember Sherlock’s axiom, the one I put on that blackboard the very first day of class:

It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.

But there is a caveat to this. As long as you keep an open mind, it doesn’t hurt to test whatever theory you’ve come up with. I’m not new to this case. In a sense, I’ve been working on it for twenty-two years. So now, in memory of the woman buried beneath me, the one who suffered and scraped and fought and made a good life for herself only for some worthless piece of shit to snuff it out, I am going to find the truth.

Or that is what I am telling myself.

Because she didn’t ask me to find the truth, did she? She made it clear what she wanted from me.

“Promise me first.”

“Promise you what?”

“That you won’t hurt them. That you’ll protect them.”

So will the truth protect them? And if it won’t—if it ends up the truth will hurt them—will I have to break my final promise to her?

“Kierce?” It’s Marty. “You okay?”

I nod.

“Your doctor called. So did Molly. We made a deal I’d have you back by now.”

Standing is hard, what with your arm in a sling. Marty comes over to help me, but I shake him off. I get up with a grimace. I brush off the dirt with one hand.

By the time we drive back to the hospital, I’m hurting pretty good, but I don’t want to take another pill. Molly is there. She hugs me gently, sniffs, and says, “You need a shower.”

“It’s a hospital,” I say. “Can’t you give me a sponge bath?”

“I’m glad you’re feeling better. But no. Get showered and in bed.”

She helps with that. Night falls. I make her leave. She and Henry are staying with her sister because I don’t want them home without me until I know it’s safe. I fall asleep. Not deeply. I call it hospital sleep. It’s a shallow snooze, skimming the surface of consciousness. I don’t know if it’s the machine’s beeping or the lowered voices or just the fact that you’re in this place that houses so much fear and pain. The doctor tells me I can be released the day after tomorrow, and like any rational human being I am ecstatic.

I get a text message right before I fall asleep. It’s from Judith Burkett:

Caroline will see you tomorrow at noon. Don’t be tardy.

Tardy. Who uses the word tardy except when you’re talking about school?

Then:

Please don’t upset her.

I hit the thumb emoji on both messages because I don’t want to say anything to her. Then I pound my pillow and try to make myself comfortable. It doesn’t work, but eventually the drugs do.

It is early the next morning when a whisper awakens me.

“Kierce?”

I don’t move, don’t even open my eyes. I recognize the voice. It’s Polly.

“Gary’s watching for the nurse,” Polly says in the same soft whisper. “Visiting hours don’t start for another three hours. But we found something we need you to see.”

I blink my eyes open. I’m still groggy from the drugs. “Polly?”

“You were right about Scraggly Dude,” she says.

“What?” I try to sit up. “What did you find?”

“We did what you suggested—went through all the inmates who spent any time in the past eighteen years at Sing Sing Correctional Facility. We sorted them in reverse chronological order, which is why it took so long. Naturally it was a huge job. The guy you call Scraggly Dude? He was clean-shaven back then. His hair was short too.”

“But you found him?”

“Yeah. We did. His name is Brian Powell. And guess who his cellmate was for a full six months.”

I knew it and yet I still can’t believe it. “Tad Grayson?”

She nods.

I stand quickly. “Do you know where Powell lives?”

“In Newark. We have an address.”

I roll my legs off the bed. “Help me get dressed.”