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CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

Tom went upstairs to collect the clothes he’d worn to the rehearsal dinner. Binder was rounding up his detectives. I went to find Jordan Thomas.

He was in the kitchen, his back to me, packing one of the last plastic totes for the boat. He was alone. The caterers were carrying their stuff and the day’s garbage down to the Jacquie II, helped by the waitstaff and even some of the uniformed police who were clocking off duty.

“Jordan, I need to talk to you.” I kept my voice as even as I could.

He turned around, his face in a worried frown. “Did I do something wrong? If I did, I’m sorry. I’m learning.” He held out his arms in a gesture of hopelessness.

“You did great.” I said. “Jordan, tell me why you’re not in school.”

His face fell, and he didn’t speak for a long time. “How much do you know?” he finally asked.

“Very little. Start from the beginning.”

He looked around, as if he might be rescued from a conversation he profoundly did not want to have by the arrival of another person. Then he groaned, putting both hands to his face. “It was always just my mom and me,” he began, his hands falling to his sides. “And that was fine. She’s a great mom. I never felt the lack of anything. Really. Maybe on Parents Day at school, or at Boy Scouts, but hardly ever.”

“What did your mother tell you about your father?”

“Almost nothing. I didn’t like to ask. It made her unhappy, and I tried my hardest not to make her unhappy.” He stopped speaking. I thought he might refuse to continue, but then he started again. “Because we were so tight, when I went away to college last August, it was hard for Mom. Not that she didn’t want me to go. It was all she ever talked about, going to a good school, getting a good start in life. But I’m sure she was lonely. Taking care of me had been a big part of her life. The biggest part.”

He breathed deeply to steady himself. We were coming to the heart of the story. “Like I said, I left for school in August for freshman stuff. I was at UC Davis. I loved it and was doing well in my classes. I made friends. I missed Mom for sure, and probably I could have checked in more, though I don’t think it would have made a difference. When I came home for Thanksgiving, there was this guy living in our house.”

“Kendall Clarkson.”

“Yes. But he called himself Kent Carlson.” Jordan squared his shoulders and went on. “I didn’t like him. I didn’t like him one bit. But I told myself it was none of my business. Mom had dedicated her life to me for eighteen years. She should be able to find her own happiness. I thought I was jealous, and that was a pretty immature way to be. So I kept my mouth shut. I went back to school for my finals.”

He paused and looked around again, still hoping help might come in the form of an interruption. I was pretty certain it wouldn’t. The kitchen was clean, its surfaces empty and shining. If the merry band of caterers, servers, and troopers had taken the last loads to the boat, they would have stayed on it or down near the dock.

“When I went back for Christmas, I was relieved the guy was gone. My mother said only that they broke up. I figured she’d come to her senses. At least that what I wished.”

He paused, and I thought of what Binder had said, “If wishes were horses . . .”

“Things were a little odd at home. The tree wasn’t up, or any decorations, no lights outside. Mom is a hard-core Christmas person. The decorations normally would have gone up the Monday after Thanksgiving. I’d brought the boxes up from the basement when I was home, but that was as far as she got. I rationalized that she’d been distracted with the breakup, and she didn’t have me at home to appreciate the tree. I thought maybe that, all those years, the decorations were for me and not something she loved to do, like she’d often told me.”

Jordan’s voice was steady. It might be a relief to be finally telling this story.

“Mom told me she’d taken vacation from work for my entire time off so that we could hang out together,” he continued. “That seemed extreme to me. I had high school friends I wanted to spend time with. But I was so glad that guy was out of the picture I didn’t object. I didn’t see what was clearly in front of my face.”

He was sad and worried, but there was a good measure of guilt in him, too. Even though I hadn’t yet heard the full story, I wanted to hug the poor kid and tell him that it was Kendall Clarkson who was guilty, not him. Instead, I asked, “What did your mother do for work?”

“She worked at an animation studio. She started as a storyboard artist soon after I was born, but now she manages lots of people. She’s not an executive, but almost.”

Another artist.“Did she say how she met Clarkson, er, Carlson?”

He gave me a fleeting smile. “I know who you’re talking about. In a museum. They were admiring the same painting.”

I nodded; that certainly tracked with Clarkson’s MO.

Jordan continued. “I went back to school. It was two weeks into the winter quarter when I got called into the bursar’s office. They told me I couldn’t continue with my classes because my tuition hadn’t been paid. My dorm fees hadn’t been paid either. I was sure it was a mistake. I called Mom, but she didn’t answer. I texted and emailed. I even called her work. The person who picked up told me Mom was out sick.”

My stomach curled into a knot; even though I’d been expecting this story, listening to the pain and confusion that still lingered in Jordan’s voice was gutting.

“Finally, I reached her. She sounded funny. She said I needed to come home. I was already packed. I’d been so worried. I took a bus. It was sixteen panicking hours. When I got to the house, it was dark. No lights were on. She told me that, when Carlson had gone, he’d taken all her money—savings, retirement fund, my college fund, everything. He’d maxed out her credit cards. She couldn’t pay them off, and her credit was being destroyed. He even took her car.”

Clarkson had finally found a mark who had money.

“Mom wasn’t up to going to work. She pretty much stayed in bed all day and watched television all night. Her employer was patient; she’d been there forever, but eventually they had to put her on unpaid leave. I begged her to go to a doctor. I thought maybe then she could go on disability from work, but she totally refused.

“I got jobs at two restaurants, the ones I gave you for references. I made enough to keep us fed and keep the lights on, but I couldn’t make enough for the mortgage. We’d moved right before high school to get closer to the private school I attended. Our house was really nice, but expensive.”

He had painted a picture for me. A very sad picture. But something must have changed.

“One day, I got home from work and Mom was up.” Jordan smiled at the memory. “There was laundry in the washer and dinner on the table. Mom is a great cook. She’s taken lots of classes and stuff. That’s how she got the job with Ms. Trevett after a tryout. Again, I should have realized something was up, but I was so happy to have her back, I didn’t probe too much.”

“Stop blaming yourself,” I said. “You didn’t cause this.”

“I sort of did. If I hadn’t been born, Mom wouldn’t be, well, who she is. She’d have had a different life. Maybe even a nice husband and other kids. And even with the life we had, if I hadn’t left for college, she wouldn’t have brought that man home.”

“Your mother doesn’t wish you weren’t born,” I said firmly. “That’s the last thing she wishes. And you said yourself her greatest hope was for you to go to college.” I looked into his eyes to see if he believed me. I saw a flicker of relief, perhaps, but then the sadness and the guilt returned. “When did your mother start feeling better?”

“It was the end of March. I didn’t expect it to last, but it did. She was up every day, showered and dressed. She didn’t go back to work, but otherwise she was her old self. A week later, she told me not to pay the utilities and the minimum payments I’d been making on the credit cards, hoping maybe to get some of her credit back. Mom said that, instead, we were going to save my cash tips and convert my checks to cash so we could take a cross-country trip. She’d agreed to trade some of our good furniture to a neighbor for a used car. I was surprised, but happy to play along if she was smiling.”

It wasn’t until two days before they left that Mel Thomas told her son they weren’t coming back; they were moving to Maine permanently. She’d always wanted to live on a craggy coast. He should pack not only clothes, but his scrapbook and the bear he’d slept with as a child and any other favored remembrances because the sheriff would surely be seizing the house in their absence.

This struck me as disordered thinking. The house was probably worth more than she’d paid and would have sold quickly in a hot Los Angeles real estate market. I wondered if Jordan was sophisticated enough to realize this. He’d had to grow up quickly in the last few months, but he’d been a freshman in college when the whole ordeal began. Probably not much interested in mortgages or home buying. He did know, he told me, that there were craggy coasts a lot closer than Maine but had been so grateful to have his mother back, he didn’t argue.

The trip across country hadn’t quite been the adventure she’d sold him. They had some fun and saw some sights, but by the time they left Memphis, they barely had enough money for food and gas. They slept in their car, so they’d have money for the deposit when they got to the campground. As to why Busman’s Harbor, he hadn’t understood that until today, when the pieces of the puzzle had fallen into place for him.

“I agreed to come here to start a new life for both of us,” he finished, his breath ragged. “That’s all it ever was to me.” He stopped talking abruptly, like a machine that had been unplugged.

“And now you’re worried your mother killed Kendall Clarkson.” I looked directly into his eyes.

But instead of looking at me, his eyes grew wide, like he couldn’t believe what he was seeing. His mouth opened, but no sound came out.

I whirled around to see Mel Thomas advancing on me, a big kitchen knife in her fist, aimed at my neck. I leapt sideways as the knife whooshed past me. I was fast, but Jordan was faster. His hand shot out toward the blade of the knife just as his mother brought it down.

He screamed as a line of red spread across his palm, and then blood ran down his hand, dripping from his fingers onto the floor.

The knife dropped with a clatter, and Jordan’s mom sank to her knees. She pulled her son down to her until his head was in her lap. She held up the bloody hand, applying pressure and looked at me in desperation. “Do something. Do something. Please.”

Jordan whimpered. His mother sobbed. I kicked the knife across the floor, far out of her reach, and then yelled for help as loudly as I could.

* * *

Mel Thomas sat on a stool in the kitchen, her hands cuffed behind her back.

Tom had been the first one through the door. When he’d seen Mel and Jordan on the floor, Jordan bleeding on the white and black tiles, he yelled for others to help.

Now Jordan was on another stool about ten feet from his mother. The same state trooper who had put the plastic ties around his mother’s wrists had bandaged his wound. “Good enough until we can him get to a hospital,” he’d said. The first-aid kit had finally been good for something.

Binder had offered to have the trooper take Jordan to another part of the house to wait, but the boy had refused. He was staying with his mother until he couldn’t anymore.

“Let him stay.” Binder said. The trooper went away.

That left the five of us, Jordan, his mother, Binder, Tom, and me. The long June twilight had finally ended. It was fully dark outside, but the kitchen was brightly lit. Binder had let the Jacquie II go back to town. Livvie had taken her children to the little yellow house. Sonny had ferried the bride and groom to Busman’s Harbor. They’d spend the night in Zoey’s apartment. Binder had said he would interview them in the morning so they could leave on their honeymoon, delayed only by a few hours.

Tom pulled three more stools from under the stainless-steel table, and we sat about ten feet away, facing Jordan and his mother in their corners.

“I wouldn’t have killed you,” Mel said to me. She turned to her son. “I never meant to hurt you. I don’t mean just that.” She pointed to his hand, and then she cried.

“But you did mean to kill Kendall Clarkson,” Binder said when she quieted, his tone neutral, the statement of a fact.

I widened my eyes at Jordan from the other side of the room and jerked my head toward his mother. Tom had read her the Miranda warning when they’d put the handcuffs on her. She’d responded, but I wasn’t sure she’d taken it in.

Jordan understood me and said, “Mom, you should wait for a lawyer.”

Mel shook her head so hard she nearly fell off the stool, her balance diminished by the hands tied behind her back. “No.” She was definite. “I want to tell. I want people to know what happened to me.”

Tom waved his phone at her and pantomimed pushing the record button. She nodded her assent. He stood and put it on the stainless-steel table at the corner nearest her.

“I met him in September, Clarkson—or Carlson, as he was calling himself then—at the Getty. I often went there for inspiration for my work, but that day I was filling up an empty Saturday afternoon. Jordan had always played soccer, and that had taken up my fall weekends for more than a decade. I was very much at a loss. I was admiring a still life by Cezanne, a bowl filled with apples, when Kent came up beside me and we began to chat. He was so knowledgeable about the painting and the artist. I was charmed immediately. He was handsome and well-dressed.” She looked at me for a female opinion. Clarkson was good-looking, and the blue blazer had fit him like it was custom-tailored.

I nodded my confirmation, and she went on. “If he was a little older, so be it. We went out for coffee and the next time for dinner, and then he stayed over one night and then another. I had never had men over when Jordan was home. It was intoxicating.

“I assumed, in the beginning, that he had his own place, and we were spending lots of time at mine. But bits and pieces began to appear in my house, clothing, and grooming stuff at first. Then paints and canvases in various stages of completion. He took over my sunroom. Then he brought in finished ceramics and paintings by other artists. I finally realized, ‘Oh, he’s living here.’ ”

She stopped for a moment and asked for a glass of water. Tom fetched it from the sink and held it to her lips as she drank. “That’s enough. Thanks.” She started again. “I’d thought, when we met and for weeks afterward, that he was retired. He didn’t go out to work. That much was clear. Slowly, I became aware that he hadn’t offered to pay for anything.

“These things put me off, but when Jordan came home for Thanksgiving, I introduced them. Kent was living in the house and had nowhere else to go, so there wasn’t any choice about it. Nevertheless, I’d never had Jordan meet any man I’d dated before. It felt like a big deal. A rite of passage.

“Then, two days after Jordan left, Kent was gone. And so was every penny I had. But you’ll already know that part of the story.”

I did, and Tom and Binder knew enough about Kendall Clarkson to guess.

“I was stunned. I was angry, but most of all, I was hurt.” Her face drew up in a terrible grimace that I thought would become a sob, but it didn’t. Instead, she exhaled loudly and continued. “I started to miss work. Kent had taken my car, and my savings, any hope of buying another car. I was Uber-ing to work on the days I could get it together enough to go in. When they canceled my credit cards, even that wasn’t possible. Days at a time, I would lie in my bed with the covers over my head.

“I spent a lot of my time speculating about what kind of person Kent was. How I, a mature woman with some experience with men, had been completely taken in by him. I went over every moment of our brief courtship, and then our domestic life. I stalked him on the internet, but he’d given me a false name. I kept looking, looking, looking for the hints. For the tells. What did I miss?

“I’d missed so many things I came to see clearly in retrospect. But my romantic hurt wasn’t the worst of it. I’d always, always taken inordinate pride in how well I, a single parent, had provided for Jordan and me. We were financially stable. I could cover most of Jordan’s college expenses. I’d saved for my retirement. When Kent took that, I couldn’t recover. We were in financial free fall. Even worse, my identity as a competent, self-sufficient woman who could care for her fatherless child was exploded. Kendall Clarkson had robbed me of my identity as a mother, as an employee, and as a person. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I felt like a ghost.”

“Mom.” Jordan’s voice was ragged with emotion. “You were the best mom anyone ever had.”

“You never reported this to the police,” Tom said.

Mel shrugged her shoulders as much as she was able to with her hands cuffed behind her back. “I was embarrassed. And what would I have told them? As it turned out, I didn’t even know his name.”

She swallowed and went on. “Later, I remembered a conversation with Kent about his daughter,” Mel said. “He never spoke about family, but that one time he bragged about how successful she was. Playing the proud papa, or maybe actually being one. He let down his guard, and her name had slipped out. Zoey Butterfield.

“I stalked her on the web, inhaling everything I could find. I put an alert on her name, and at the end of March, delivered to my inbox, was a link to a newspaper in Busman’s Harbor, Maine. It announced the wedding of Zoey Butterfield to James Dawes, on Morrow Island, the first weekend in June. At last, I had a reason to get up in the morning. I convinced Jordan to move across the country.”

She stopped abruptly, as if she’d only in that moment realized what she’d said. “I’m sorry, honey. It was wrong of me to involve you even in the most tangential way. But I couldn’t leave you behind. You were all I had left.”

Jordan’s brown eyes shimmered with tears that didn’t fall. He gulped, his Adam’s apple moving up and down, and then nodded for her to go on.

“I bought the nicotine in Arizona at a smoke shop and the syringe at a pharmacy in Tennessee. Both are perfectly legal.”

“Mom! The lawyer—”

“No.” Mel shook her head, and he went quiet. “I asked around when we got here and found out who the caterer for the wedding was. It wasn’t hard. It’s a small town, and Carol was thrilled about it, bragging to anyone who would listen. Everyone needs staff here. The rest was easy.”

“To be clear, you injected a lethal dosage of nicotine into Mr. Clarkson behind his ear,” Binder said.

“I did. I hoped it was a lethal amount. Everything I read told me it should be.”

“You did it at the end of the cocktail party,” I said. “Up on the lawn when he was scanning for a place to sit. I saw him rubbing his hair as he walked to the dining pavilion. I thought an insect had bitten him.”

“Yes,” Mel said. “That’s what I did. Now the state of Maine can take care of me for the rest of my life, since I clearly can’t take care of myself. And my son will be free to live his life without the burden of me.”

“You aren’t a burden.” Jordan said it without hope. He knew the time for hope had passed.

“I would have become one in time.”

Binder told Mel she’d need to give a formal statement at the police station. I didn’t see her story changing.

Jordan was a witness. He’d need to give a statement, too, after his hand was stitched. We all went down to the dock, where the state troopers and a marine patrol boat waited. Our Whaler was back. Sonny had returned to his family.

Tom and I lingered on the dock. He kissed me and held me tight. “You’re sure you’re okay?” he said. “I have to go.’

“I am and I know.”