by Edwin Hill
Thankfully, Stan had fielded all of the calls from Donald Ambrose with demands for updates. If Stan was good for anything besides ruining Angela’s days off, it was running interference and giving her the space she needed to do her job. Now, she drove toward Everett to interview one of the veterans who’d attended the benefit, Jamie Williams. The sun had set for the day, and she punched in Cary’s number, who sighed audibly when Angela asked her to pick Isaiah up at swim practice. She wondered if Cary cared more about having to pick up the boy or that Angela had lost her day off. “I’m gonna be home right after I finish with this interview. I’ll even bring Thai, okay.”
Cary laughed. “You’re good for a bribe, I’ll give you that.”
Angela clicked off, but her phone rang almost immediately, just as she pulled into downtown Everett. It was Stan.
“Where are you?” he asked.
“Following up on a lead,” Angela said, giving him a brief update on where she was with the case.
“Hold up,” he said. “I think we may have something new.”
*
We need to talk.
That’s what the text from Morgan said, and it made Hester stop in the middle of clicking Kate into her car seat. She read the message again. Morgan rarely texted, period, and when he did, he was usually short and to the point.
She wiped at her lips. Gabe’s kiss had stunned her, even if she’d known that he had a crush on her. It had been obvious from the moment they met. It was why she hadn’t told Gabe that she lived with Morgan, that they were raising a child and a dog together, that she insisted on keeping her own apartment and her own mailbox and her own mess, even though—in truth—she rarely went to the third floor anymore. It had also made her feel good. Wanted. Like she was her own person again. But even now, after all these years of being with Morgan, of being loved, reading this text made her feel that she was on the very edge of being alone, and as much as Hester fought for independence, nothing frightened her more than the thought of being abandoned.
Can you give me a preview? she texted back.
Morgan responded a moment later. Meet me at home. I’ll be done here by 6:30.
See you then! Hester wrote, but hardly felt the exclamation point.
She lifted Waffles into the truck and pulled out of the parking lot. It wasn’t even five o’clock, but the sun had already disappeared over the horizon. The holiday lights lining the Somerville streets did nothing to cheer her up either. However irrational, she somehow felt complicit in the kiss, even though, in truth, all she’d done was to pull away and leave.
“Kate,” she said, “don’t tell Uncle Morgan about the Popsicle sticks.”
“Kate want Popsicle sticks!”
“You gave them to my friend. Remember?” Hester said, even though that was exactly what she didn’t want Kate to remember. It hardly mattered, though, because Kate had already begun to melt into a tantrum, and when Hester got to her street, she kept driving. The thought of sitting in the house, with the Christmas lights on and the kittens running over everything and this noise, was too much to bear. She turned left onto Route 24, barely listening to Kate or the newscaster on the local public radio station who talked about the ongoing search for that woman who’d gone missing over the weekend.
“Where Aunt Hester go?” Kate finally said from the backseat. She sniffled again, but the worst of the crisis seemed to have passed.
“We’re visiting a friend,” Hester said, and twenty minutes later she pulled up in front of an old triple-decker on a quiet street in Everett. She double-checked the address on her phone, and then lifted Kate from her car seat and knocked on the door to the first floor. She waited, sniffing the winter air, already heavy with the feel of pending snow. “Don’t tell Uncle Morgan we came here,” she said.
Inside, a dog scampered to the door and yipped, which got Waffles to howl too. Through lacy curtains hanging over the door’s window, Hester saw Jamie’s silhouette as he lumbered down the hallway and opened the door a crack.
“We met earlier today at the hospital,” Hester said over the barking. “Do you remember?”
Jamie nodded and took a moment to respond. “But what are you doing here?” he asked in one long breath.
“Could I come in for a moment? I’m sorry. I brought the whole gang with me. This is my niece, Kate. And the loudmouth is Waffles.”
Jamie’s gaze shifted down to where Waffles howled. “I like waffles,” he said.
“So do I,” Hester said. “That’s where she got her name.”
Jamie swung the door open a bit. The small white dog he introduced as Butch scampered around his feet. Waffles dashed into the house and the two dogs sniffed each other and then ran down the long hallway and disappeared into one of the rooms. Hester held Kate’s hand and stepped over the threshold. “I don’t normally pop in unannounced like this,” she said. “But I didn’t have your phone number.”
“You had my address, though,” Jamie said. His voice was flat, but he smiled the tiniest bit, like he was on to her game.
“Addresses are easier to find these days. No one has a listed number anymore,” Hester said.
Jamie lived in a long, railroad apartment, with dirty white walls and steaming radiators. Not a single holiday decoration hung from the walls. In fact, nothing hung from the walls. He led Hester to the back of the apartment, to a kitchen with dated, almond-colored appliances and a chipped tile floor. A pot of water boiled on the electric stove.
“Making dinner,” he said.
An open can of chili sat on the counter next to a box of macaroni and cheese. He motioned to a set of stools, and Hester lifted Kate onto one and perched on the other.
“Chili mac,” Hester said. “That’s one of my favorites.”
“Me too. You can have some.”
“I’d love to. But I need to go home in a minute.” She paused. “I think I’m in trouble,” she added, almost to herself.
“Why?” Jamie watched the water boil, and stirred the pasta.
“I don’t know,” Hester said.
“I bet you do.”
Hester sighed. “I’ve been keeping things from my boyfriend. Things I should have told him.”
“That’s not good.” Jamie drained the pasta into a colander. He added milk and a dollop of butter, and then stirred in dried cheese till the whole pot was filled with orangey pasta.
“Kate want macaroni and cheese!” Kate said, and Hester prepared for another meltdown, but Jamie filled a small bowl for her. Kate gobbled the pasta up while he dumped the can of chili into the pot and heated it on the stove.
“Do you mind if I eat?” he asked a moment later.
“Please,” Hester said. “I shouldn’t be bothering you.”
“Why’d you come?”
“I don’t really know.”
“Stay,” Jamie said. “It’s not so bad to eat with someone.”
He stood at the counter across from her and ate with a wooden spoon.
“I used to do that,” Hester said. “Eat whatever I wanted, right at the counter. I’d come home from school when I was a kid and I’d have cereal for dinner. Or toast, maybe. Sometimes I’d pull every vegetable in the refrigerator out, the ones that were about to rot, and I’d mix them with pasta and ketchup and call it Bachelorette Surprise. I’d stand at the counter and watch Jeopardy! Sometimes, when my mother had left a bottle out, I’d drink a glass of wine on my own. I started drinking by myself when I was eight. Do you ever drink by yourself?”
“Every night,” Jamie said. He closed his eyes. When he spoke, it was all Hester could do to be patient and not fill in words for him, as he told her that he did nearly everything by himself, that he’d talked about that very topic earlier that day in his therapy session. He told her that sometimes he stared off at nothing and didn’t know that hours had gone by, and then would realize that someone was talking to him, and he’d see how frightened they were. “Big, black, and stupid,” he said, choosing the words carefully. “At least
that’s what they believe.”
Hester nearly told him not to say that, but she knew before the words came out that he was right. That was the way some people perceived him. Listening to him stumble through his thoughts, waiting for him to find the right words, was painful. And yet she didn’t want to leave.
“Do you want a beer?” he asked.
“Sure,” she said.
He popped open two cans of Bud Light.
“How long have you known Sam?” Hester asked.
“Sam?”
“Aaron,” she said, correcting herself. “I meant Aaron Gewirtzman.”
“Not long,” Jamie said. “He asked me to a party. I’m the type you want at a cocktail party. Quite the conversationalist.”
“Was it at the Richardses’ house?”
Jamie nodded, and Hester thought about the postcard with the photo of the mansion on Louisburg Square. It seemed like weeks ago that she’d sat outside that house in her truck and seen Sam for the first time. What had Sam’s note read? She couldn’t remember, but it was a quote from The Shining. She hadn’t given the postcards much thought for a couple of days now.
“What was the benefit like?”
Jamie shrugged. “Like being a fly in milk. Aaron barely talked to me. And that woman went missing. The one who’s been in the news.”
“I haven’t paid much attention.”
Jamie told her that he was supposed to talk to a detective about it who’d called earlier.
“What else do you know about Sam?”
“Aaron,” Jamie said. “You keep calling him Sam.”
“He looks like someone I used to know.”
“Not a lot, but he’s nice to me for some reason. I have seizures because of the bullet wound, so I can’t drive. It don’t take less than three hours to get to the VA on public transportation. Sometimes I can’t remember simple things.” He paused. “And it makes me angry.”
“I bet everything that happened to you makes you angry,” Hester said.
Jamie thought about it for a moment. “Sometimes,” he said.
Hester glanced at her phone. It was nearly six-thirty already, right when Morgan had said he’d be leaving work. “I don’t want to go home,” she said, realizing, suddenly, that it was true, realizing that this whole case, every part of it, had been about finding herself in a world that was feeling smaller and more constricted and less in her control by the day. It wasn’t that she wanted to leave Morgan or Kate or Waffles, but tonight, this night, she wanted her life to be about herself again, if only for a moment. So they sat and talked for longer than Hester ever would have expected. Once she got used to the way Jamie spoke, the stops and starts, the long searches for words, he came alive. He talked about growing up in Everett, where he’d played football and scored with girls and got into a tussle with the law over selling pot. He told her about driving along a dusty road in Afghanistan and coming under a hail of bullets, and then waking in a hospital a few months later. “It been a struggle ever since,” he said.
“I hope it’s getting better,” Hester said.
“Sometimes.”
Jamie opened the freezer and took out a cheesecake. “When you lived alone,” he asked, “did you buy things like this and tell yourself you wouldn’t eat all of it?”
“I’m a Golden Girl at heart. I’ve never met a frozen cheesecake I couldn’t eat in a single sitting.”
It was seven-thirty now, and Hester’s phone had already rung three times. She turned off the ringer and let it sit silently in her pocket. She lifted Kate onto the floor so the girl could crawl around with the dogs, even if the floor did look dirty. “Kate can have a little piece, but cut the rest of it in half!”
Jamie slid the cheesecake from the box. It was covered with strawberries, their thick, red glaze bleeding down the sides. He took out a stainless-steel chef’s knife that gleamed under the kitchen lights. When he sliced the cheesecake into two neat halves, he swept the knife out so that it was streaked with bright red strawberry syrup. Hester felt her stomach rumble as both dogs barked.
“Quiet, you two,” she said.
But Waffles was on her feet, running down the hallway, with Butch at her heels.
Then Hester heard a noise, followed by a loud crash. “What the … ?”
She glanced at Jamie, confused. His eyes had grown wide. He held the knife in front of him.
Someone shouted from the hallway.
Hester leaped from the stool. Where was Kate? Down the hallway, the front door had been smashed open. Police in SWAT uniforms swarmed in, visors down, guns raised, and Hester actually thought there must be something going on outside, something that the police needed to protect them from. And then an officer shouted at her. His words were garbled beneath his visor. He waved the gun, and she saw Kate on the floor by the refrigerator. She fought to grab the girl, and she was on her knees, the officer still shouting, and she realized he was shouting at her and telling her to get down and not to move. Another officer swept Kate up and retreated from the apartment. Kate shrieked and reached toward her. Hester struggled to follow, but the officer pushed her down again. Waffles ran after them, howling, till another officer caught her around the neck with a noose.
“What are you doing?” Hester shouted. “Give her to me!”
“Hands up!” the officer shouted.
Hester put her hands on the back of her head as a black woman walked through the lines of officers. She held up a detective’s badge. “Jamie Williams?” she said. “I’ll need you to put that knife down.”
The entire apartment was filled with cops wearing helmets and bulletproof vests, and every single one of them had a gun drawn. Outside, through the open doorway, a sea of neighbors had already filled the sidewalk. Hester could see their phones raised, recording the moment.
“Get back!” Jamie said, slashing the knife in front of him, his eyes wide with fear.
“Jamie, give her the knife,” Hester said, trying to keep her voice calm. She wanted to get to him, to tell him that this, whatever this was, would all work out.
“Please, Mr. Williams,” the detective said, holding her hands in front of herself. “Give me the knife. Nobody needs to get hurt.”
“I ain’t done nothing,” Jamie said.
The detective took another step into the kitchen. “We can talk this through.” Her voice was soft. Calm. “We can leave here without anything else happening. Please, Mr. Williams. Put the knife down.” She paused. “We’re here to keep you safe.”
Jamie lunged forward, and then Hester’s face felt warm and wet long before she heard the shot. It sounded like a tiny firecracker. Jamie slumped to the floor. A red stain spread across his chest, and his eyes fluttered. The police charged forward, and in the chaos, Hester scrambled through them and fought her way to his side. She fumbled with a fistful of dish towels that hung from the stove. “Stay awake,” she said, pressing at his chest. Blood pooled onto the chipped tile floor and welled up around her fingers.
“Ma’am, you need to leave,” the detective said.
“He was just standing there!”
“He had a knife,” the detective said. And then she shouted into the radio on her shoulder. “We need a bus!” she said. “We need a fucking bus!”
CHAPTER 21
It was nearly nine o’clock by the time Hester pulled into her driveway. She still felt numb to what had happened, and yet played it over again in her head. She could see the EMTs working on Jamie as they lifted him onto a gurney, handcuffed him to it, and rushed him to the hospital. She could also see the crime scene investigators cordoning off the backyard and pulling a mutilated body from a shed. The body was Laura “Twig” Ambrose, who’d been missing since Saturday, so soon the street outside had filled with reporters, cameras, and vans. A bit later, Hester gave her statement to Detective White. She felt exhausted as she held Kate on her lap and told the detective all about Sam and Gabe, about being hired by Lila Blaine, and what she’d found out earlier about Cheryl Jenkins a
nd Bobby Englewood. “I don’t know if there’s any connection to this,” Hester said. “But the two of them ran a pedophile ring. You should let the New Hampshire State Police know.”
“We’ll look into that,” Detective White said. “What town did you say they lived in?”
“Holderness.”
The detective flipped through a few pages in her notebook, and jotted something next to Hester’s name. “Thank you. That was helpful. You should go home now,” she said. “You okay to drive?”
“I think so,” Hester said.
The whole time this had been happening, Hester hadn’t turned her phone on, and only now, sitting in the driveway, did she think to check it. Morgan had left twelve voice mails and twenty-three texts. She’d forgotten that feeling of dread that had come over her with the first text he’d sent, and now all she wanted was to be with him. She lifted a sleeping Kate over her shoulder, put Waffles on the leash, and leapt out of the truck. She glanced up the street, which was quieter than normal as people hunkered down for the pending storm. Cars lined half of the street; the other half was cleared for the snow emergency. As she headed up the front pathway to the house, the very first flakes fell around her, and she turned her face up toward the sky to let the splotches of cold melt on her cheeks.
At the front door, she listened. The whole house was silent. She let the dog’s leash go and followed her up the staircase, where Hester contemplated heading to the third floor and dealing with the consequences in the morning. Instead, she let herself into Morgan’s apartment.
At first, she wasn’t sure whether he was home. The house was dark, except for a single light over the stove in the kitchen. Kate stirred in her arms. One of the kittens launched itself from the kitchen counter and made Hester jump. Waffles scampered across the wooden floor and into the living area. It was only then that she saw Morgan sitting alone in the dark and knew that she’d been right all along. He was angry.
“There you are,” she said. “Why are you sitting in the dark?”
Morgan didn’t move.
“Kate potty,” Kate said.