Nine Lives, page 11
Jack stood up and shook Eric’s hand. He’d been prepared for the forceful grip of a young finance guy but was still shocked by just how much it actually hurt.
“Yeah, she told me about your book,” Eric said, “but couldn’t tell me anything about it, of course. I looked you up. Six months on the Times bestseller list. Not too shabby.”
“That was a long time ago,” Jack said.
“Jack’s going to come over to our house for dinner on Thursday night,” Margaret said, looking up at Eric’s profile. “It’s all planned. There will be no octopus on the menu.”
“Ri-ight,” Eric said, furrowing his brow at Jack as though they were the longtime friends, and Margaret was the stranger who said odd things.
“Margaret asked me what I ate, and I told her I ate anything but octopus.”
“Oh, man. You been to that Spanish place downtown? Something something tapas bar. The octopus there is fucking delicious. You’d change your mind, I promise you.”
Margaret threaded her arm through Eric’s and said, “Let’s leave Jack alone now. I need to start making dinner, anyway.”
Her husband turned to her, and Jack found himself focusing on the tendons in Eric’s neck. “You been drinking?” he said.
“I’ve had one drink, thanks to Jack’s hospitality.”
“You just kind of reek of gin. Whatcha making for dinner?”
“Come with me, and I’ll tell you. Jack, thanks for the drink. Looking forward to Thursday.”
They turned and made their way to their house, and Jack stood in place for a little while, feeling inordinately sad.
Back in the house he went from room to room, turning on lights. It was now fully dusk, his least favorite time of the day, and the only thing that kept the gloom from depressing him was a well-lit house. In the kitchen he opened up his refrigerator, wondering what he might have for dinner, even though he mostly felt like having another gin.
4
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 10:06 A.M.
Jessica was looking at her travel bag, which was sitting on her coffee table. She was dressed in track pants and a hooded sweatshirt. It was going to be at least an eight-hour drive to get to Gwen’s cottage in Maine, and she wanted to be comfortable.
She made a sudden decision, went into her study, opened the closet, and found a large cardboard box filled with old paperwork that she’d been meaning to shred for about six months now. She dumped the paperwork out onto the floor of the closet and brought the box back with her into the living room, then transferred all of her clothes and toiletries into the box. That was better.
She’d already turned her iPhone off and put it in her desk drawer. It was going to be strange to be without it, but her life was strange now, no matter what.
She picked up the cardboard box with both arms, and awkwardly swung open her door, stepped outside onto her front step, and closed the door behind her. She walked to her Camry, and stowed the cardboard box on the backseat, aware she was being watched from the blue sedan parked over by the communal swimming pool. She walked in the car’s direction, waving at the occupant. The window rolled down as she got close enough to speak.
“Just letting you know I’m heading into the office to drop some things off. Then I’m coming straight back here.”
The man in the driver’s seat was familiar to her as a new agent at her office. He had the wide shoulders and distant eyes of a former member of the military. “That’s good timing, actually. I’m at the end of my shift.”
“You spot anything last night?”
“Just a late-night skinny dipper.”
Jessica laughed. “You mean Bob. Every night at midnight until about October. Sorry you had to see that.”
“Me too.”
“Are you heading back to the office?”
“I’ll follow you there, then return the car. You’ll be checking in with Agent Berlin, right?”
“I will.”
Jessica drove to the office, keeping an eye on the agent behind her. She pulled into the visitor’s lot, and he veered away to park where the company cars were kept. She swept the car around in a U-turn and exited out of the lot, then headed north on 787. She planned on working her way across Vermont and then New Hampshire and then into Maine, staying away from toll roads. She’d brought her old road atlas with her and was actually looking forward to finding a place using a physical map instead of GPS.
She got mildly lost around Concord in New Hampshire and stopped for lunch at a diner. Sitting in a booth, waiting for her hamburger and drinking her Pepsi, she honestly had no idea what to do without her phone. Normally she’d be scrolling through the news or playing Threes or just checking out the weather. She felt unmoored, and focused instead on what was around her, the worn vinyl table, the waitress with a noticeable limp, the older couple each eating soup silently together. She wondered what it was going to be like in Maine at Gwen’s cottage. She knew it had wireless, and she’d brought her personal laptop so she’d be able to follow any public information that was reported about the people on the list. The one concrete thing she planned on doing was calling Arthur Kruse’s father, and finding out if he’d known her own dad. Other than that line of inquiry, she didn’t know what her plans were, except to be invisible until the killer was apprehended. Hopefully, there were some good books at the cottage, since she’d neglected, stupidly, to pack any.
After eating her hamburger, Jessica went back outside to her car, and studied the map, figuring out the best route. It had begun to rain, a thin mist that swirled through the air, turning everything slightly out of focus. She found a college radio station that was playing a Valerie June song, put the wipers on the lowest setting, and set out for Maine.
She arrived at the cottage on the St. George Peninsula just after dusk. The thin rain had turned into driving sheets and high winds. She pulled the car as close as possible to the front door of the shingled cottage, but it took her five minutes to find the key that was hidden under the heart-shaped rock along the front garden. By the time she was inside with her box of clothes, she was soaked through and shivering. Before exploring the house, she stripped out of her clothes and took a long hot shower in the downstairs bathroom. Afterward she got into her flannel pajamas, unpacked her box, and went and looked through the kitchen for something to eat. The refrigerator was filled with mostly condiments, although there was one bottle of beer that turned out, after she’d taken a shockingly unpleasant sip, to be a hard cider. In one of the cabinets there was a can of Italian wedding soup, and she heated it up in a pan. That and the cider would have to be her dinner.
The two-bedroom cottage was small, with exposed ceiling beams that had been painted white, and lots of abstract paintings on the wall that on closer inspection all seemed to be seascapes. Jessica unpacked her things in the larger of the two bedrooms, then went and checked the bookshelf in the upstairs hall for something to read. She normally liked thrillers, but most of Gwen’s books were contemporary literary fiction. She plucked out a book with an interesting title called Started Early, Took My Dog and decided to give it a shot. She read a quarter of the book tucked up in the unfamiliar bed, then turned out the bedside lamp, and listened to the wind for the hour it took her to fall into a shallow, nervous sleep.
5
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 3:33 P.M.
Hey, detective,” Clara said.
Sam Hamilton had been surprised to see her behind the front desk of the Windward Resort. Last time he’d run into Clara she’d been waitressing at the Kennewick Harbor Inn.
“You’re back here now, Clara?” he said.
“I’m just filling in because Karen’s on vacation. I’m still at the Inn as well.”
“Busy over there?”
“At the inn? It’s been crazy. Here, not so much.”
Sam had noticed the slightly musty smell of the Windward as he’d walked across the worn linoleum to reach the front desk. He assumed that the only thing keeping the old hotel in business was the persistence of its owner. Now that he was gone, he doubted the Windward would stay open for a year.
Sam knew most of the year-round residents of Kennewick, at least by sight, if not by name, but he knew Clara particularly well because she’d shadowed him for a couple of days about eight years ago, back when she’d been a reporter on the Kennewick High School newspaper her senior year. He knew she’d gone to Boston University to study journalism, but a couple of years ago she’d returned to town and gotten work first at the Windward and then as a waitress at the Kennewick Harbor Inn. Rumor was that she’d come back to Kennewick because of Brad Romer, another local who was nowhere near good enough for her.
“Clara, do you think I could take a look at Frank’s office? I’m sure the state police have been through it, but I thought I’d take a look-see myself.”
She shrugged. “It’s fine with me. You know where it is, right? I don’t think it’ll be locked.”
“Yeah, I know.”
Sam began to walk in the direction of the hallway that led to Frank’s back office, but stopped, and said, “Any gossip around here? About Frank’s death?”
Clara frowned while she thought about the question, and Frank thought how much she looked like her mother, June, one of the circle of Kennewick residents who took turns being the town’s problematic drunk. “You mean, like who might have wanted to kill him?”
“That’s a good place to start.”
“No one, I think. Everyone liked Frank.”
“Okay,” Sam said.
Clara looked as though she were still thinking, so Sam said, “What about romances?”
“Frank?” she said and grimaced a little. “I don’t think so. He had a crush on Shelly, but that was a one-way affair, for sure. No, sorry, Sam, I don’t think I can help you.”
“You’ll let me know if you hear anything.”
“I will, but the only rumors that go around aren’t ones you’d be interested in.”
“What do you mean?” Sam said.
“Oh, the big rumor is that the Windward is haunted. You didn’t know that.”
“No.”
“Well, that’s what the staff says. There’s phantom smells up on the second floor of the annex, you know where I’m talking about, and apparently two of the cleaning ladies claim there’s a ghost in the old ballroom.”
“Hmm.”
“Yeah, I didn’t think you’d be too interested,” Clara said. She was now leaning back in the high swivel chair behind the desk. Her face looked a little puffy, Sam thought.
“What do these ghost rumors have to do with Frank getting killed on the beach?”
“Do you know Milana? She’s one of the cleaners. She said he was haunted by the ghosts and they made him go down there and drown himself.” Clara did some approximation of an Eastern European accent.
“Not unless that ghost grabbed him from behind and pushed him into the water.”
Clara grimaced again, and Sam apologized before making his way down to Frank’s office.
It was a tiny space, made more cramped by the piled-up boxes against every wall. There was one desk, and one chair, the desk weighed down with paperwork. Not knowing where to start, Sam decided to sit down in the upholstered office chair, where Frank had sat all those years. Sam opened the middle drawer, crammed with old invoices and mini bottles of brandy, most empty, some still sealed. The other drawers were crammed with paperwork as well, all of it seemingly related to the running of the hotel. Sam, not even officially on this case, did not quite have the energy to go through all the piles. He did pull out one rubber-banded stack of thick creamy paper jammed down the side of the largest drawer; the rubber band, completely dried out, crumbled when he pulled at it, and he was looking at a bunch of yellowed menus from a Christmas Eve dinner in 1986. Shrimp cocktail, then beef Wellington. Sam was hit with a wave of sadness at the passage of time, wondering if anyone even remembered this particular dinner. Had anything significant happened? Love affairs? Breakups? How many of its guests were still alive?
He put the menus back where he’d found them and stared straight ahead. There was a bulletin board leaning on top of the desk and against the wall. Like everything else in this office it was crammed with hotel business: old receipts; Post-it Notes; job applications. Most were layered on top of one another, but there was one photograph pinned into the bulletin board, and although it was partially covered up along its edges, it was clear that Frank hadn’t wanted to entirely cover it. Sam plucked it off the board. It was a family photograph, black and white and slightly faded. It showed a youngish couple, the man in a suit and a hat, the woman in a summer dress with polka dots. Between them were two children, a girl who was maybe twelve, and a younger boy, around eight. The boy was scowling slightly, as though he’d had to pose just a little too long for this particular photo. It was clearly Frank, his face hadn’t changed much in all his years, and these were clearly his parents, the original owners of the hotel. They stood in front of the main entrance to the Windward, the carved wooden sign unchanged.
Sam sat still for some time, thinking, the photograph in his lap.
There is a method in all this, he thought. The list is not accidental, not coincidental. And Frank was killed first. In fact, the killer hand-delivered Frank’s list directly to him, let him open it, then murdered him. Sam couldn’t help but think that something Frank had done, or something that had been done to him, was crucial in figuring out what was going on.
And what the picture told Sam was that Frank’s life, unlike most lives these days, had been spent entirely in one place. Here in Kennewick, Maine. At the Windward Resort. And that made Sam think that the answer to what was happening might be found here, at this decaying hotel, where Frank had spent his life. He thought of the ghosts that only the foreign cleaners could see, and he thought of all the people who had stayed here over the long years. It would be thousands for sure. Would it be hundreds of thousands?
Sam returned the photograph to the bulletin board, pushing the tack back through the already existing hole along its uppermost edge.
He wondered about Frank’s older sister, and if she was still alive.
6
MONDAY, SEPTEMBER 19, 4:35 P.M.
It had been several months since Tod Fischer had received a phone call from the woman he knew only as Linda. He imagined that Linda probably got a phone call from someone, maybe a Fred, only the first name and a voice over the phone. And Fred told Linda to call him. Information was passed along a chain of people who didn’t know one another, all talking on unregistered cell phones.
The funny thing about Linda was that she always sounded so happy to hear his voice, as though they were old friends, or maybe just amiable coworkers, which he guessed they were in a way.
“Hi,” she said. “It’s Linda.” She never used his name, maybe because she didn’t know it. He was a phone number and a voice.
“It’s been a while,” Fischer said.
“I know, right?” said Linda. Fischer, who was watching his youngest boy play Pee Wee football on a misty field two towns from where they lived, said nothing, and eventually she added, “Do you have a pencil handy?”
She always asked that, and Fischer always said, “I do,” even though what he had was a very good memory.
“Okay, then. Jessica Albers Winslow. I’ll spell it out for you just in case.” As she spelled out the name Fischer pictured the letters being written on a chalkboard. Once the name was there, he knew he’d never forget it. “Her date of birth is December 3, 1975, and her current address is 17 Tamarack Meadow Way, in Thornton, New York. Just outside of Albany.”
“Okay. Got it,” Fischer said. Because he was standing about fifteen yards back from the football field it had become impossible to tell which of the miniature black-and-red football players was Jerome, his son. He could tell, however, that his son’s team, the Trojans, had just given up a touchdown.
“She’s an FBI agent out of the Albany field office.” There was a slight question mark in Linda’s voice that Fischer ignored.
“Okay,” he said.
“But the thing is, she’s currently not in New York. The client believes that she is in Maine but does not know exactly where in Maine. She was tailed, but she was lost somewhere along Route 1 north of Thomaston and Rockland. She’s driving a white Toyota Camry, the 2012 model, and her license number is—”
“Hold up, Linda, give me a moment,” Fischer said. Yes, he had a very good memory, but wasn’t sure he’d correctly memorize a license, along with all this other information. He trotted over to Suzie Maris, a mom who never missed one of her son’s games, and a woman who carried a purse the size of a Thanksgiving turkey. He was pretty sure she’d have a pen and a piece of paper somewhere in that purse.
She did, and he returned to where he’d been standing and took down the number.
“Ready for the good part?” Linda said.
“I’m always ready,” he said.
“Fifteen thousand wired direct into your account upon acceptance of the job. Thirty-five thousand upon completion. Not too shabby.”
“Not too shabby,” he said. “Any special instructions?”
“Yes, actually. One word. Painless.” She said it with a little lilt in her voice, as though she were telling him her cat’s name.
“Okay, got it,” he said. It wasn’t a concern. “Painless” was his specialty.
“Do you accept, or do you want some time to think about it?”
“What’s the timeline?”
“Oh, sorry. I forgot about that. ASAP is all it says. There’s not a definitive timeline besides that.”
“Okay.”
“Okay, you accept?”
“Sure,” Fischer said.
“Great,” Linda said, genuine happiness in her voice, even though Fischer had never not accepted a job before. “You have all the details?” she said.
“I have them all, Linda, thanks.”
