Page 58

Julia

There’d be no more grilling. No cocktails, no boating, swimming, lounging, or hiking. The vacation was over before it really even started. But in the grand scheme of things, what did it matter? A woman was missing, most likely dead, and one of the Lake Gang was responsible. That trumped all.

The stress of the past few days had short-circuited Julia’s taste buds. Sitting in Erika’s living room, she picked at the sandwich her friend had prepared, but it tasted like cardboard. Rick’s freshly popped popcorn was stale as old bread.

Taylor wasn’t eating, either, though probably for different reasons.

Before she went to Erika’s house, Julia checked in on her daughter, who was isolating in her room.

Taylor assured her she was fine, but wanted to be left alone.

Julia respected her need for space, but they still had another person to talk to—Christian.

Julia didn’t have it in her to respond to his last text message, and whatever pot farm scheme he was concocting would obviously take a back seat to the current crisis.

“Do you want to be the one to tell him, or should I?” she’d asked Taylor. “Give it some thought, but we have to call him soon. He’s your father and needs to know what’s going on.”

Taylor’s whole body sagged. “I’ll tell him,” she said, her voice hardly above a whisper. “I just need a little more time.”

Julia gave her shoulder a supportive squeeze.

Taylor asked, “What’s going to happen to David? And will Izzy have to leave the lake?”

Julia couldn’t say. It was more uncertainty they’d have to sit with, which was never comfortable.

Erika and Rick were stuck in the same uncomfortable waiting place, but at least they knew how to pass the time: drink.

Julia joined in with a glass of wine, pretending to eat her sandwich, all while seated under the ever-watchful gaze of Cormac Gallagher’s stoic portrait and the heads of many dead deer.

“I’m too sick about David and Fiona to stay here any longer,” Erika stated. “My caseload feels more relaxing than the lake at this point.”

She didn’t know the half of it. Julia had revealed nothing of Izzy’s relationship to Susie Welch.

It wasn’t her place to share, which meant she hadn’t told Erika or Rick about the Polaroid, or Anna Olsen’s letter, either.

And she couldn’t broach the topic of the pregnancy until Taylor told Lucas herself.

She was dreading that difficult conversation, but it had to be addressed soon.

“I just can’t believe it,” said Rick, who seemed far more relaxed than was appropriate, but shock could do that to a person. He stuffed popcorn into his mouth, some falling onto the new rug that had replaced the brown one Julia despised.

There it was again—the rug, what was it about the old brown rug that bothered Julia so much?

“I see it all the time in my law practice. Good people getting caught up in the heat of the moment, too much alcohol, one bad decision, and their lives are ruined,” Erika said matter-of-factly.

“Well, I’d say Fiona got the worst of it,” said Rick. “Poor girl.”

“Of course,” Erika agreed. “It’s just, as a defense attorney I tend to think of it from the client’s perspective.”

Julia was aghast. “This isn’t some unknown client and random victim, Erika. It’s David and Fiona we’re talking about. Our longtime friend and a woman we saw alive and well, in her prime, just days ago. Now there’s nothing left of her but a bloodied shirt. It’s horrifying.”

“I know, I don’t mean to be crass. But I’ve seen a lot of terrible things in my line of work. It can be easy to depersonalize it.” Erika coupled her observation with an apologetic look. “And you’re right. It is horrifying. Guess you never really know what’s in somebody’s heart.”

Or head, thought Julia, wishing she better understood what Erika was thinking and feeling.

Even after playing with the twins and bagging up the bloody evidence, Erika didn’t have a crease in her summer capris or a stain on her crisp white blouse.

She appeared cool and collected. Did the law really harden you to that extent?

Erika had screamed at first, but soon after her composure kicked in like a well-honed muscle.

Rick was the same. What this unlikely couple had most in common at the moment was their cavalier attitude—first toward the glass house and now regarding these disturbing new developments.

With David’s secrets out in the open, Julia wondered again what Erika and Rick might also be hiding. Then again, who was she to judge? Julia couldn’t be fully forthcoming without revealing information about Izzy, the depth of her financial woes, and her trip to Bennington.

In thinking it over, it was the Mob aspect that bothered Julia the most. In a short period, the Mob had come up twice—and both times, there was a connection to the lake lore.

Obviously, David had nothing to do with Anna Olsen’s disappearance; he hadn’t even been born. But could Jimmy T have been a resident of Lake Timmeny? That was an unsettling possibility, though it was probably a stretch.

Curious enough to google him, Julia got up to excuse herself. “The wine actually isn’t sitting well with me. I’m going to make some tea. Anybody need something from the kitchen?”

Erika and Rick declined. The drink was beside the point.

Boiling water and steeping tea should give Julia time to do some research without her absence being noticed.

She sat herself at the breakfast bar, lost in her phone, barely hearing Lucas playing guitar upstairs or Rick and Erika’s faint conversation wafting in from the living room.

Julia had done a cursory exploration of Jimmy T after the Bennington trip.

She ended up with little, but now she narrowed her focus.

She remembered the name the bartender gave her: Jim Tracey.

But because of his association with porn and crime, Mr. Tracey had done an exemplary job of keeping his face off the internet, even when she added ‘Lake Timmeny’ to her searches.

He had no social media presence, and according to the court appearances that Google indexed, no arrest record, which made it unsurprising to find no news stories written about him.

Jimmy T played it clean for good reason.

Low exposure made it easier to run his rackets.

And if he had a couple of connections to the local police, as the bartender implied, any slipups could easily become cover-ups.

That would explain why David’s failure to monitor for revenge porn had enraged him.

There were some ramifications even Jimmy T couldn’t control, including the FBI investigation and the media spotlight following Bella’s death.

Julia came across others with the name “Jim Tracey” as she searched, but she doubted they were the Jimmy T. She felt stuck, and, no surprise, caved in to her compulsion to check Instagram for a distraction.

However, the thought of Instagram gave Julia another idea. Jimmy T may have kept his photo from ever landing on the internet, and Fiona’s social accounts were nonexistent. But Fiona did have a best friend who might have an active account in memoriam.

Finding Bella’s last name and the link to her Instagram page didn’t take long.

Luckily, the profile wasn’t set to private.

Bella, like Fiona, had been an aspiring actress and used social media to promote herself.

There was no shortage of both personal and professional pics on her account, and Julia started to peruse images of this young woman’s short life.

Bella was a raven-haired beauty with caramel-colored eyes and a fresh-faced appeal that was tailor-made for show business. Her last post was from her family, announcing her passing with a headshot that Bella probably would have selected herself, if only she’d been able.

Julia kept a close eye out for photos of Fiona with her dad in the feed.

Jimmy T cared enough about his daughter’s friend to allegedly toss the man who had betrayed Bella off a bridge.

It seemed conceivable he could be in one or more of Bella’s pics—a group shot, most likely.

If she got lucky, Julia could put a face to the name and maybe uncover something to link the notorious gangster to Lake Timmeny and Anna Olsen.

Bella’s posts were nothing extraordinary, a bunch of the usual shots—dinner with friends, out at concerts, pictures of her cocktails, Bella on the beach showing off a youthful figure.

Fiona was featured in many of the posts, looking dazzling and full of vitality, but her handle, @FeistyFiona, went nowhere since her profile had evidently been deactivated at some point.

Bella, however, kept posting up until the end.

There were several pics of her with a handsome young man with thick auburn hair.

In one, his arm was draped around Bella as she showed off an impressive diamond on her left hand, gazing into the camera with bright eyes and a brilliant smile that spoke of a future full of promise.

Julia realized, with a knot in her stomach, that this must be Bella’s beloved ex-fiancé.

She kept scrolling, losing hope as she went through years of Bella’s life in reverse chronological order, all her trips, her haircuts, sunsets, books she’d read, movies she’d seen, plays she’d performed in, and parties she’d attended.

It was disorienting to watch someone who had passed on move away from their death. Only she knew Bella’s time was short and her joy on lease. The knowledge burdened Julia in a way that infused each image with a palpable weightiness. She felt intrusive, like a macabre voyeur.

But she was glad she stuck it out, because near the end (or beginning, actually) was a fresh-faced, very young picture of Bella broadcasting a big smile on her graduation day from SUNY Albany.

And there, embracing her in a half hug, was Fiona also in cap and gown, with two men on either side of the young women who Julia assumed had to be their proud fathers.

The caption read:

Our dads didn’t think we’d pull it off! #jokesonyou #wemadeit #ontothenext #love #apprecationpost #ohtheplacesyoullgo

Bella stood next to a handsome fellow in his fifties, and, if the post was to be believed, the man next to Fiona must be her father, Jimmy T.

Julia was expecting a frightening mobster—square head and jaw, muscular and imposing—but what she saw surprised her.

Jim Tracey was the dad-next-door type. He had an average build and was fortunate to have a thick head of dark hair touched with silver.

His most distinguishing characteristic was his bushy, mouse-brown mustache.

It gave him an approachable air, which he augmented with a pair of tortoiseshell glasses that magnified his soft blue eyes.

He was dressed for the occasion in a light gray sport coat over a white collared shirt, no tie.

To Julia, he looked like a workingman, not a thug and pornographer—certainly not some gangster who might have masterminded the not-so-accidental death of Bella’s ex-boyfriend.

What struck Julia most wasn’t this man’s unpretentious demeanor and dapper style of dress. It was the shocking realization that he was currently staring at her out of two separate pictures.

Almost in a daze, Julia stood up and held her phone next to a framed photograph hanging on the kitchen wall across from her.

It was an image of Cormac Gallagher taken years ago, holding a fishing rod on the dock he had built himself.

His fishing companion stood beside him, grinning ear to ear—a dark-haired, handsome, mustached man Julia knew from her childhood, but who she now realized bore a striking resemblance to the much older gentleman celebrating his daughter’s graduation.

Julia’s mind went blank for a second, but soon enough restarted like a frozen computer. Fiona’s father, Jim Tracey, might be known in some circles as Jimmy T, but to Erika, he was always Uncle James.