Reg said, “Was he close to his mother?”
“Quentin? He was there when she needed him.”
“That’s good. They had each other.”
Summer was still holding his hands. This was starting to feel like group therapy, and so she let go. Leaned back in her chair. “Quentin never knew, though,” Summer said. “He never knew about her running away.”
“She never told him?”
“No.”
“Wow.”
“Any idea where she may have gone for those few weeks?”
He nodded. “We had a second home,” he said. “A little cottage out east. We went there a lot when Katie was little, but maybe only once after Kimmy was born. After . . . what happened . . . Oh, I didn’t go out there for years. But once Katie left for good, I decided I should probably get it cleaned up so I could sell it. I found a whole bunch of Katie’s old clothes in there. Back from when she was fourteen years old.”
“So she was staying at your second home?”
He smiled a little. “Here I thought she was out on the streets somewhere. But she was at our place the whole time. She used to love going to that cottage when she was little. You wouldn’t think a little girl would be so crazy about the desert, but she was a strange kid.”
“The desert,” Summer said. “You said out east, I was picturing a cabin in Vermont.”
“Nah, it was driving distance,” he said. “Or I guess hitchhiking distance in Katie’s case. Little town on the Arizona border. Brittlebush it’s called.”
FOR SUMMER, LIFE so often seemed to move in loops. For instance, now. This drive. When Dean had called her with the news of Quentin’s death, she’d been on her way to Brittlebush, where she planned to see if she could track down information on Nicola Crane and Renee White, who had apparently lived there with a foster father by the name of Bill Grumley.
All that had been canceled, of course, along with the podcast. But a day and a half later, here she was, looping back, taking the same drive in search of the same information, the podcast alive again with possibility. She was wearing Quentin’s sunglasses, and she found herself talking to him in her mind, planning out questions as she drove, her arm resting against her open window, warm air blowing in, feeling more focused and tougher than she ever imagined she could feel. Looping back to her old self. Quentin at her side, or the spirit of him, anyway.
She’d asked Reg for the sunglasses, and he’d gladly given them to her, along with the address of his onetime second home and, since he apparently saved everything, some of the old clothes he’d found of Kate’s there. He’d given her something else he’d found at the cottage with the clothes—a fluffy pink stuffed dog that looked like something a toddler would own. “I swear this didn’t belong to either of my girls,” Reg had said. “I don’t know what it was doing there.”
We’re gonna figure this out, she told Quentin in her mind. We’re gonna report the hell out of this, together.
Summer flipped on the radio. Aimee Mann’s version of an old song called “Baby Blue”—which, oddly enough, had been Gabriel LeRoy’s nickname for April Cooper. Summer knew that from her research, and she saw it as a sign.
Summer usually wasn’t one for magical thinking. But imagining signs from above and messages from the great beyond and speculating about divinely choreographed podcasts was easier than spending any time on the fact that before killing himself, her best friend had apparently gunned down a defenseless couple in their own home. It felt like fiction to her, less believable even than the existence of ghosts.
At least, that’s the way she wanted it to feel.
The very last conversation she’d had with Quentin had been at 11:30 P.M. her time, the day before his death. He’d been up all night reading, he told her, and he’d thanked her for finally finding the book. “You kill someone,” he had said, “and you become a different person. There’s no lag time. No subtle transformation. In those few seconds it takes to end someone’s life, you go from being someone who has never killed, to a murderer.”
Summer had assumed he was talking about Cooper and LeRoy, and so she’d said, “Imagine how that feels if you’re just a kid.”
But he’d ignored the comment. “What I’m wondering, Summer, is this. How do you live your same life after you’ve become that other person? Because it seems impossible to me. It seems like, if you’re evil enough to kill someone, you probably shouldn’t live at all. Right?”
She shook the thought away, replacing that sad, tremulous voice with that of another Quentin, the imagined one in her passenger’s seat. The Quentin that she knew. Just focus on the story, said the imagined Quentin—smiling, strong, and unafraid. Her best friend, who would stay with her, always. We’ve got a lot of work ahead of us.
Thirty-Six
Robin
ROBIN WOKE UP to the smell of bacon and the sound of muffled laughter. With her eyes still closed, she lay in bed for a few moments, believing she was a kid again and it was Sunday morning, both her parents downstairs, her mother in her apron, freshly cooked bacon lined up on a stretched-out paper towel. In her mind, she saw Mom giving Dad a playful push as he tried to swipe a piece, and it felt real, as though adulthood had been a long, problematic dream she was finally waking up from.
But the feeling dissolved as soon as she opened her eyes. When she threw on her robe and headed downstairs, she saw that it was Nicola who was in the kitchen cooking the bacon, one of her mother’s aprons tied around jeans and a denim shirt. Mom stood beside her in her robe and pajamas, cracking an egg into a bowl. She was easing out of a recent bout of laughter, wiping a tear from her cheek. “Oh, Nikki, you’re just crazy,” she said. It was strange how Nicola affected Renee. She made her happy, clearly. But unnaturally happy, Robin thought, especially given the circumstances. It was starting to annoy her, which made her angry with herself.
Eric sat at her mother’s kitchen table in his work clothes, reading the New York Post. Her parents subscribed to the Post, the Times, the Daily News, and the Wall Street Journal. On Sunday mornings, after breakfast, they’d go back to bed with all the papers and read them to each other. According to Mom, Dad secretly loved the gossip on Page 6 and would always try and guess the blind items . . . Robin swallowed hard. Tried to tune out her mother’s laughter, Nicola’s shrieks. Everyone grieves in her own way. You know this. Be kind.
Eric stood up. Took a last gulp of his coffee and grabbed his phone. “I gotta go to work,” he said. “See you tonight, Renee?”
“Only for as long as it takes you to pick up your bag,” Mom said. “You guys need to go home. I’m fine.”
Robin said, “It’s no trouble.”
Renee looked at her. “Yes, it is.” She said it quietly and firmly, as though she were scolding a child. Then her face relaxed. “Honestly, honey. I’m fine. Nikki is taking me to the doctor this afternoon, and I’m sure I’ll pass my checkup with flying colors.”
“What about the reporters?” Eric said. “They’ll be back, as soon as they find out you’re home. At the very least, we can call the cops, run interference, say ‘no comment.’”
“I can do all those things,” Renee said.
Nicola smiled. “And so can I.”
“Okay, I guess.” He gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. Waved to Nicola. “Have a nice day.”
He kissed Robin next—gently, carefully. Then he took both her hands in his own, touched his forehead to hers. “It’ll be okay,” he whispered, less a statement than a plea.
“What will?”
“Everything.”
After Eric left, Robin moved to the kitchen table, bringing the platter of eggs and bacon that Mom and Nicola had made, along with some paper plates and plastic cutlery for easy cleanup. The Post was still open to the article Eric had been reading—a one-pager headlined PODCAST KILLER’S LAST WORDS. There was a large photograph of a letter, typed up and printed out, the words blurred except for Quentin Garrison’s signature, and the closing: Good-bye. Someone had le
aked his suicide note. Morasco could not have been happy about that.
At least the article was a short one—just four inches, and print outlets tended to hang on to stories a little longer than online ones. Last night, #PodcastKiller was no longer trending on Twitter. The shootings were fading from the news cycle, Robin thought. Or at least hoped.
Interesting that Eric hadn’t shown the article to her, though. Or even mentioned it . . . Then again, it took Eric a long time to mention things, and even then he sometimes had to be blackmailed into it . . .
She shooed the thought away. She’d come back to it later, she knew. But right now, she had to focus on Garrison. The note that had been found next to his body—a “mini-confession,” as the papers put it, with a signature to make it binding. An audio file emailed to the cops, plus the note, which had been pinned to the jacket of his ruined body. Even for the most thorough of journalists, Quentin’s confession felt a bit excessive.
Robin sat down and started to read, as Mom and Nicola joined her at the table, Nicola carrying a fresh pot of coffee and a bowl of cut-up melon. Mom said, “What are you reading, sweetie?”
Robin showed her the article, and she winced.
“Did Detective Morasco show you this note, Mom?”
“Yes,” she said. “He also played me the recording he made.”
“Did it help you remember anything?”
Renee glanced at Nicola. “No more than I already have,” she said. “I think the detective was hoping the sound of Quentin Garrison’s voice might trigger something. But, honestly, I can’t remember anything from that night now. It’s worse than when I first came out of the coma.”
Robin nodded. It did make sense. The human body was full of defenses.
The article paraphrased what was in the suicide note and began with a direct quote from it: My apologies to friends and family, who have been so good to me, but I’ve done something unforgivable. I can no longer live with myself.
As Robin continued to read, her mom complimented Nikki on the bacon. “How do you get it so crispy without burning it?” she said, as though her husband’s killer’s suicide note weren’t sitting inches away.
Besides apologizing to the Bloom family, and saying he didn’t deserve someone as wonderful as his husband, Quentin had also gone into some detail about the events of that night: How he’d parked his car a block over and walked quietly to the Bloom residence, digital recorder in hand. How he’d surprised Mitchell in the kitchen as he prepared a sandwich, how Renee had heard them arguing and burst in with the gun and how Quentin had gotten it away from her and shot them both. All over an interview request. I wanted to speak to Mitchell Bloom to gain insight into human rage—something that’s long been festering within me, he had written. Ironically, that rage caught fire and transformed me that night, into something I’ve worked my whole life not to be. The presence of the gun made for the perfect storm. May God forgive me.
Mom and Nicola were discussing the best way to make eggs à la française. “Mom,” Robin said. “In Quentin Garrison’s suicide note, he said you brought the gun in the room. Did you?”
“He’s a liar,” Nicola said. But Robin didn’t even glance at her.
Her mother looked pale, her eyes sad. “No, he isn’t,” she said. “I did.”
Robin said, “You said Dad bought the gun.”
“It actually wasn’t Dad,” she said quietly. “It was Nikki.”
Robin looked at her. Nicola put a hand over Mom’s and squeezed. “It’s okay,” she whispered.
“There was an incident. It scared me. I called Nikki, and she advised me to purchase a firearm. She took me to a range so I could practice. Nikki’s a former police officer. She knows these things.”
Robin looked at Nicola. “What incident?” she said. “When?”
“Years and years ago. A man attacked her.”
“In a parking lot.” Mom gave Robin a tender smile. “You were away at college.”
“He attacked you?”
“He hit me. Nearly broke my jaw.”
“Trying to get her purse,” Nicola said.
“He hit me. There’s nothing like that feeling, Robin . . . A man’s fist. The cruelty of it. It’s worse than the pain.”
“Why didn’t you ever tell me?”
“Because thank God, I got away from him.”
“She fought back,” Nicola said.
“I didn’t want to scare you while you were away at school. And anyway, I hate guns. I was embarrassed to own one. I kept it hidden. I didn’t tell your father.”
“Why?”
“I didn’t tell anybody, honey. It was in the safe in the basement. I forgot I even had it.”
Robin had grown up in this house. She had no idea that her parents had a safe in the basement.
Nicola put an arm around Renee, rubbed her shoulder.
“I was frightened,” Renee said, tears forming in her eyes. “I mean . . . I had to be, right? I . . . I had to have felt threatened. Terrified. I had to have felt like that gun was my only hope.”
Robin moved closer. She put her arms around Renee and drew Nicola in too. “Of course you did,” Nicola said. And the three of them stayed like that for a long while. Robin felt safe. Like a child.
There was something else about the article that bothered Robin, but it wasn’t anything Mom or Nicola could help her with. It was the phrasing on the note.
Mom pulled away, wiped a tear from her cheek. “Oh honey, I forgot. You must see what Nikki gave me.” She stood up, and Robin’s eyes went right to it—the glittering aquamarine heart at her throat. “Isn’t it beautiful?”
“Very,” she said, her gaze moving from the necklace to Nicola’s smiling face. “Nicola showed it to me right after she bought it. I told her I knew you’d love it.”
Mom’s eyes widened. “Really?”
“You love aquamarine. Everybody knows that. It’s your color too.”
Nicola winked. “I swore her to secrecy,” she said, and Mom’s smile grew bright enough to hurt.
“I’m so happy that you two have been getting to know each other again.”
Nicola said, “Robin and I talked about Kate Sharkey. Quentin Garrison’s mother.” Robin thought about the Polaroid she’d shown Nicola. She’d put that back last night, finally, while Eric and Mom were asleep.
Mom said, “You did?”
“I was quoted in an old article that Robin found about Kate. Remember the wax museum in L.A.?”
“Not really . . .”
“Anyway, she asked if you knew her too, and you know what? I wasn’t sure whether you did or not.”
Renee said, “I only knew her through you.”
“And you never mentioned that either, Mom? You never told the cops?”
“It wasn’t relevant,” she said. “Kate was Nikki’s friend. I never even knew she’d ever been married or had a son.”
Robin started to respond, but Nicola spoke first. “Robin’s right,” she said. “It is strange. Me knowing that family like I did. So many years ago. Isn’t it strange, Renee?”
“It’s a smaller world than we realize,” she said. “You know, Detective Morasco’s wife has perfect autobiographical memory. She literally never forgets a face. And he said that she once told him that there are only a handful of people in the entire world she hasn’t seen at least twice.”
Robin thought of Quentin Garrison’s small family and her own small family, orbiting each other for so many years before finally colliding. She thought of April Cooper and Gabriel LeRoy, somehow fueling it all. All these connections . . . Strange seemed a mild word for that, “small world” even milder.
Renee moved to her and stroked her hair. She put a warm hand on her shoulder and kissed her on the cheek, her lips cool and dry on her skin. “Life is full of coincidences, honey,” she said. “We try and put them all together and we hope they’ll add up to make something meaningful. But the sad truth is, they hardly ever do. They’re just coincidences, that’s all.
Stupid, pointless coincidences.”
ROBIN HAD NO intention of going to work right away, but still she drove all the way to the train station before calling Detective Morasco. She wasn’t sure why, but she felt compelled to follow her regular routine. Maybe because she had told Renee she was on her way to the office, and making that initial effort felt less to her like she was lying to her mother—something Robin got a lot guiltier over than most forty-one-year-old women. “I’d like to listen to that recording Quentin Garrison made,” she said, once Morasco picked up. “Is this an okay time to come by?”
He agreed, and Robin called Eileen and let her know she’d be coming in late. “I’ve been asked to go to the police station this morning,” she explained, which was only a half lie, really. And she needed to hear the audio recording.
When she was just a few blocks away from the Tarry Ridge station, Morasco called her and told her not to go through the front door, that he’d meet her in the parking lot, and when she got there, she understood why. There were two news vans out front, along with a handful of reporters. Guess the story hasn’t faded from the news cycle.
There was a parking lot behind the station, and Robin checked her Twitter once she’d pulled into a space. #PodcastKiller was trending again. #DeanConrad was too, his picture popping up all up and down her feed. A ringer for Jon Voight in Midnight Cowboy, with a little Steve McQueen thrown in to make things interesting. Handsome, heartbroken Dean . . . Morasco greeted her at the back entrance. “Quentin Garrison’s husband is coming in later today, and the press found out about it,” he explained, though she’d already figured that out.
He ushered her in, leading her through an enormous squad room with floor-to-ceiling windows, gleaming hardwood floors and executive-size desks, many of them empty. Like every municipal building in town, the Tarry Ridge police station was ridiculously sleek and architectural and far too big for what was needed of it. There had been a scandal involving a developer a few years back, but before his arrest, most all of Tarry Ridge had been supersized and overrenovated, losing all the charm Robin remembered it having when she was growing up.
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